Many of today's power-split hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) utilize planetarygears (PGs) to connect the powertrain elements together. Recent power-splitHEVs tend to use two PGs and some of them have multiple modes to achieve betterfuel economy and driving performance. Looking to the future, hybrid powertraintechnologies must be enhanced to design hybrid light trucks. For light trucks,the need for multi-mode and more PGs is stronger, to achieve the requiredperformance. To systematically explore all the possible designs of multi-modeHEVs with three PGs, an efficient searching and optimization methodology isproposed. All possible clutch topology and modes for one existing configurationthat uses three PGs were exhaustively searched. The launching performance isfirst used to screen out designs that fail to satisfy the required launchingperformance. A near-optimal and computationally efficient energy managementstrategy was then employed to identify designs that achieve good fuel economy.The proposed design process successfully identify 8 designs that achieve betterlaunching performance and better fuel economy, while using fewer number ofclutches than the benchmark and a patented design.
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