Modelling and Simulation of a Hybrid Electric Vehicle for Shell Eco-marathon and an Electric Go-kart

Abstract: The first part of this master thesis describes the MATLAB/Simulink modelling and simulation of the series hybrid car, Smarter, that was built by master students in electrical and mechanical engineering and competing for Chalmers in Shell Eco-marathon in May 2009. This simulation tool is meant as a help in the design and evaluation of the Smarter vehicle. Components in the driveline can be varied and the effect on the Smarter fuel efficiency can be investigated.The second part of this thesis describes the work of modelling and simulating an electric go-kart, that was carried out at QRTECH. There is no original for the modeled go-kart, but the model is a mixture of a real electrical go-kart built at Chalmers and a partly designed go-kart intended to be built at QRTECH. Through the simulations lessons can be learned regarding the dimensioning of the QRTECH go-kart components. Both simulation tools are based on CAPSim and consist of a Simulink vehicle model, where the driveline components are represented as interconnected blocks that are communicatingphysical signals between each other in the level of seconds. Component parameters are set in an accompanying MATLAB m-fle. The simulation input is a vector containing the vehicle reference speed as a function of time. The output can be any desired simulated signal, and in the Smarter simulator it is also the coverable distance per liter of fuel. None of the models have been verified against measurements on the real objects. However, simulations show that with the driveline setup that was used in Shell Eco-marathon 2009, Smarter would have a fuel efficiency of about 255 km per liter of fuel and would place as number 10 in the overall Urban concept competition. Furthermore, it seems that adjustments of parameters of the current driveline only have moderate effects on the fuel efficiency. Therefore it is suggested that the Smarter body is modified in order to increase the fuel efficiency, or perhaps a parallel driveline is designed to be simulated and evaluated.