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Internal combustion engines (ICE) will be a part of personal transportation for the foreseeable future. One recent trend for engines has been downsizing which enables the engine to be run more efficiently over regulatory drive cycles. Due to downsizing, engine power density has increased which leads to problems with engine knock. Therefore, there is an increasing need to find a means to reduce the knock propensity of downsized engines. One of the ways of reducing knock propensity is by introducing Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) into the combustion chamber, however, volumetric efficiency also reduces with EGR which places challenges on the boosting system. The individual benefits of high-pressure (HP-EGR) and low-pressure (LP-EGR) loop EGR system to assist the boosting system of a 2.0 L Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) production engine are explored in this paper.

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, primarily designed for communication between vehicles and other entities for safety applications, is now being studied for its potential to improve vehicle energy efficiency. In previous work, a 20% reduction in energy consumption was demonstrated on a 2017 Prius Prime using V2X-enabled algorithms. A subsequent phase of the work is targeting an ambitious 30% reduction in energy consumption compared to a baseline. In this paper, we present the Eco-routing algorithm, which is key to achieving these savings. The algorithm identifies the most energy-efficient route between an Origin-Destination (O-D) pair by leveraging information accessible through commercially available Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This algorithm is evaluated both virtually and experimentally through simulations and dynamometer tests, respectively, and is shown to reduce vehicle energy consumption by 10-15% compared to the baseline over real-world routes.

Onboard sensing and external connectivity using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies allows a vehicle to "know" its future operating environment with some degree of certainty, greatly narrowing prior information gaps. The increased development of such connected and automated vehicle systems, currently used mostly for safety and driver convenience, presents new opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of individual vehicles [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in collaboration with Toyota Motor North America and University of Michigan is currently working on improving energy consumption of a Toyota Prius Prime 2017 by 20%. This paper will provide an overview of the various algorithms that are being developed to achieve the energy consumption target. Custom tools such as a traffic simulator was built to model traffic flow in Fort Worth, Texas with sufficient accuracy.