Fuel Economy Simulation and Development of an Online Data Acquisition System with HIL Method for a VW Crafter Hybrid Car

The advent of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) has significantly reduced emissions of toxic gases and fuel consumption due to conventional cars' internal combustion engines (ICEs). This paper uses MATLAB/Simulink environment to design a parallel hybrid Volkswagen (VW) Crafter, whose optimal consumption is managed by a classical proportional-integral (PI) strategy. The Vehicle is propelled by a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) and a 2.0 Turbocharged Direct Injection Common Rail (TDI CR) diesel ICE. In addition, an online data acquisition system via CAN (Controller Area Network) Bus framework was developed. The Vehicle CAN Bus system data were extracted and stored on a computer as a CSV file using LabVIEW with Vision Systems GMBH Net CAN Plus 110 hardware. Following the data storage, a graphical user interface was implemented using LabVIEW to analyse the results for engineering understanding of the acquired raw CAN data. The simulation results indicate that the designed electric car has gained better performance over the framework of the actual Vehicle's Hard-In-The-Loop (HIL) test.