Abstract
The assessment of the ecological impact of different powertrain concepts is of increasing relevance considering the enormous efforts necessary to limit the global warming effect due to the man-made climate change. Within this contribution, we adopt existing methods for the optimization of electric and hybrid electric powertrains using a vehicle simulation environment and derive a method to identify the ecological potential of different powertrain concepts for a set of technological parameters in the reference year 2030. By optimizing the parametrization for each powertrain concept and by adapting the respective operating behaviour specifically to minimize the ecological impact, a reliable and unbiased comparison is enabled. We use our optimization environment with the Real Ecological Impact as objective function to compare different powertrain concepts on driving profiles that are based on real driving data recorded in Germany. Despite the fact that all of the considered driving profiles contain trips of similar length, their respective optimized powertrain concepts are different. Plug-In Hybrid vehicles achieve the greatest potential for long-range capable vehicles and are least sensitive to different driving profiles.
Highlights
Throughout the last decades climate change has been identified as a key threat to humanity as a whole (IPCC 2014)
We present a method aiming for an unbiased comparison of the ecological impact of different vehicle powertrain concepts based on a holistic optimization framework
Present studies mostly refer to existing series production vehicles when performing a comparison of the ecological impact of different powertrain concepts, only determining the ecological impact of the respective vehicle and not the powertrain concept
Summary
Throughout the last decades climate change has been identified as a key threat to humanity as a whole (IPCC 2014). In state of the art studies, the assessment of powertrain concepts is carried out by analysing characteristic series production vehicles with regard to their GHG emissions. The result of these studies are comparisons between the underlying vehicles and do not allow general statements about specific powertrain concepts. As the basis for this analysis, we derive an objective measure, the so called Real Ecological Impact (REI) Within this contribution we introduce this criterion as result of a life cycle assessment which includes emissions in production, operational and end-of-life phases. We are going to discuss the results for different driving profiles with regard to specific powertrain concepts
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