Synthesis and analysis method for powertrain configuration of single motor hybrid electric vehicle

Abstract Existing hybrid powertrain configuration analysis methods mainly focus on power-split hybrid electric vehicles with multiple planetary gears. However, these methods cannot be applied directly to single motor hybrid electric vehicles with automatic transmission. Hence, an analysis method to optimize the powertrain configuration of single motor hybrid vehicles is proposed to overcome this limitation. In the proposed method, two different adjacency matrices are established to generate all powertrain configurations, and a corresponding matrix analysis method is proposed to analyze their working modes. Subsequently, a set of working modes are established to improve the efficiency of obtaining mathematical models of powertrain configurations. Finally, an energy management strategy based on dynamic programming is developed to analyze the performance of the generated configurations. The proposed method is utilized to analyze the single motor hybrid vehicle with a planetary gear and a continuously variable transmission, and a new configuration is obtained after the analysis for validation. It is observed that the fuel efficiency increases by 12.2% and the 0–100 km/h acceleration time is reduced by 8.7%, in comparison to the existing powertrain configuration.