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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has invested considerable research and development (R&D) effort into Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) technology because of the potential fuel displacement offered by the technology. DOE's PHEV R&D Plan [1], which is driven by the desire to reduce dependence on foreign oil by diversifying the fuel sources of automobiles, describes the various activities required to achieve the goals. The U.S. DOE will use Argonne's Powertrain Systems Analysis Toolkit (PSAT) to guide its analysis activities, stating, “Argonne's Powertrain Systems Analysis Toolkit (PSAT) will be used to design and evaluate a series of PHEVs with various ‘primary electric’ ranges, considering all-electric and charge-depleting strategies.” PSAT was used to simulate three possible charge-depleting (CD) PHEV control strategies for a power split hybrid. Trip distance was factored into the CD strategies before the cycle was started.

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) use electric energy from the grid rather than fuel energy for most short trips, therefore drastically reducing fuel consumption. Different configurations can be used for PHEVs. In this study, the parallel pre-transmission, series, and power-split configurations were compared by using global optimization. The latter allows a fair comparison among different powertrains. Each vehicle was operated optimally to ensure that the results would not be biased by non-optimally tuned or designed controllers. All vehicles were sized to have a similar all-electric range (AER), performance, and towing capacity. Several driving cycles and distances were used. The advantages of each powertrain are discussed.