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Among the research and development subjects of ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and Environment) an important theme is the study of innovative vehicles with high energy efficiency and low emissions. Our programs are aimed at designing and setting up innovative vehicles with electric propulsion. These vehicles will be of two main types: battery-powered (pure- electric) and hybrid (fuel cell/battery and diesel/battery). At the moment, the fuel-cell technology applied to engines for vehicular applications displays broad margins of convenience over any known alternative engine for what concerns the compliance with any present and foreseeable environmental and energy saving regulations. On the other hand, the use of hydrogen, produced on board from fuels or stored as a liquid or a gas, raises new problems from the point of view of safety regulations and standards both in the design and use of vehicles and in the fuel production and distribution.

Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are worldwide recognized as one of the best and most immediate opportunities to solve the problems of fuel consumption, pollutant emissions and fossil fuels depletion, thanks to the high reliability of engines and the high efficiencies of motors. Moreover, as transport policy is becoming day by day stricter all over the world, moving people or goods efficiently and cheaply is the goal that all the main automobile manufacturers are trying to reach. In this context, the municipalities are performing their own action plans for public transport and the efforts in realizing high efficiency hybrid electric buses, could be supported by the local policies. For these reasons, the authors intend to propose an efficient control strategy for a hybrid electric bus, with a series architecture for the power-train.

Within the “Industria 2015” Italian framework program, the HI-ZEV project has the aim to develop two high performance vehicles: one full electric and one hybrid. This paper deals with the electric energy storage (EES) design and testing of the hybrid vehicle. A model of the storage system has been developed, simulating each cell like an electric generator with more RC circuits in series. To take account of the heat transfer, a forced convection model has been used with the air speed proportional to the vehicle speed. The model had two calibration steps: the first has determined the electrical parameters of the model (open voltage circuit, internal resistances and capacitors); the second to calibrate the heat transfer model. The first calibration has been made on a climatic chamber at 23 °C discharging one single module with different constant currents from 5C (5 times the nominal capacity) to 25C and charging with currents in the range from 1C to 5C.

The adoption of composed (hybrid) lead acid battery-supercapacitor (SC) storage systems is able to improve performances (availability, durability, range) of an electric microcar. As a matter of fact, the supercapacitors extend the operation time not only by improving the energy efficiency (thanks to a higher contribution of regenerative braking), but also by reducing the power down caused by voltage drop at higher discharge rates. The integration of battery with supercapacitors requires careful analysis and calculation of the relationship between battery peak power and size of the SC bank, needed to have a balanced composition of the hybrid storage system. For this purpose, the optimization process, summarized here, is based on the combination of a conventional lead-acid battery and a commercial SC, with the vehicle running the ECE15 driving cycle.