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Vehicle designers make use of vehicle performance programs such as RAPTOR™ to predict the performance of concept vehicles over ranges of industry standard drive cycles. However, the accuracy of such predictions may be greatly influenced by factors requiring more specialist simulation capabilities. For example, fuel economy prediction will be heavily influenced by the performance of the engine cooling system and its impact on the vehicle's aerodynamic drag, and the load from the air-conditioning system. To improve the predictions, specialist simulation capabilities need to be applied to these aspects, and brought together with the vehicle performance calculations through co-simulation. This paper describes the approach used to enable this cosimulation and the benefits achieved by the vehicle designer.

This paper analyzes the hybridization of a conventionally powered light duty front wheel drive pick up truck by adding an electric motor driven rear axle. Also studied are the effects of using propane fuel instead of gasoline. This hybrid powertrain configuration can be described as a parallel hybrid electric vehicle. Supervisory power management control has been developed to best determine the proportion of load to be provided by the engine and/or electric motor. To perform these analyses, a simulation tool (computer model of the powertrain components) was developed using MATLAB/SIMULINK'. The models account for the thermal and mechanical efficiencies of the components and are designed to develop control strategies for meeting road loads with improved fuel economy and reduced emissions. Results of this study have shown that fuel economy can be improved and emissions reduced using commercially available components (motor, rear axle, and lead acid batteries).