Modeling of hybrid electric vehicles using gyrator theory: application to design

Modeling and design of advanced vehicles such as hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) and more electric cars (MEC) are challenging because of the presence of two power plants in the vehicle, i.e., an internal combustion engine (ICE) or a fuel cell and an electric power plant. For the modeling of such complex hybrid systems, the gyrator theory has many advantages. The most important one is that the approach results in very simple models such as an equivalent electrical circuit for both electrical and mechanical parts of the system. In this paper, after presenting the gyrator theory generalized to electromechanical systems and some preliminaries to prove the existence of gyrators in the power plants, the application to a representative HEV is discussed and a simulation on a typical EV will be run. Finally, the proposed method as a modeling and design tool is compared to other techniques such as bond-graph.