Title: Impact of regenerative braking on hybrid vehicle fuel economy

Authors: Andrew J. Stratton; John B. Heywood

Addresses: Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL, UK ' Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan Automotive Laboratory, 3-340, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Abstract: This study investigates the impact that regenerative braking has on hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) fuel economy using the Autonomie automotive simulation package. Simulations are used to compare the fuel economy of hybrid architectures with regenerative braking effectively enabled and disabled. This study investigates the impact that regenerative braking has on urban, highway and more aggressive driving, concluding that regenerative braking currently has the greatest impact on urban driving. The impact of reducing vehicle mass, rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag are analysed, both individually and together. The study also concludes that in the future, as vehicle resistances decrease, the impact of regenerative braking is going to increase for all three driving scenarios, with the greatest improvement being for the highway driving scenario.

Keywords: hybrid vehicles; regenerative braking; fuel economy; vehicle mass reduction; rolling resistance reduction; aerodynamic drag reduction; hybrid electric vehicles; HEVs; simulation; urban driving; highway driving; aggressive driving; motorway driving.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2016.082363

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2016 Vol.72 No.4, pp.285 - 304

Accepted: 01 Nov 2015
Published online: 21 Feb 2017 *

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