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The need for improved fuel economy for road vehicles has increased the interest in hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) and recovering vehicle energy. This paper aims to evaluate the amount of kinetic energy that could be restored through regenerative braking in a HEV. This work will not resort the Brazilian urban driving cycle NBR 6601, for this cycle does not fully represent a pattern of traffic faced regularly in urban areas, which is typically composed of heavy traffic and long periods of idleness. Therefore, a new drive cycle will be developed that better represents the Brazilian traffic. Also, considering the shortage of energy resources, the large amount of energy dissipated as heat during braking a vehicle is a recurring concern. Therefore, measuring the maximum available energy that could be restored through regenerative braking is the first step towards estimating the profit of using this technology and how it would pay off the investment in the long run.

The gear shifting strategies strongly influence the vehicle fuel consumption because they change the powertrain inertia and the engine operation point. The literature normally presents gear shifting strategies based on the engine power and torque to improve the vehicle acceleration performance. Strategies based on fuel economy are difficult to determine due to a large number of factors that influence the engine behavior such as the available transmission ratios, required acceleration and vehicle speed. In this paper it was evaluated the influence of the addition of more gear ratios in the vehicle gearbox, which initially contains five available gear ratios. For each proposed gearbox configuration, the gear shifting strategy was optimized through an algorithm developed to improve the engine fuel consumption in the Brazilian standard urban driving cycle NBR6601.

Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) currently represent an alternative to reducing fossil fuel consumption used by internal combustion engines. This paper analyses, in a platform of computational simulation and also in experimental condition, the vehicle fuel consumption, before and after hybridization. It checks the similarity of behaviors and/or the investigation of possible differences between the developed mathematical model and experiments performed. Computer simulations help, through mathematical models, a better understanding of physical phenomena related to engineering problems. A well elaborated computer model has a high fidelity degree with the real systems, becoming a powerful analysis tool. The experiments besides allowing a proof of results, they contribute to a refinement of the simulated models. The hybrid technology under study is characterized by the coupling of two electric motors directly to the rear vehicle wheels.