Argonne Teams with Industry to Promote PHEV R&D

November 17, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS

Argonne's collaboration with industry on PHEV technology complements a DOE initiative that provides nearly $20 million to further development of advanced batteries for hybrid technology.

In order to assist with this mission, Argonne has assumed a leading role in PHEV vehicle systems research, according to Glenn Keller, vehicle systems section leader.

Argonne's technical expertise and facilities have attracted companies in the automotive industry to seek out the laboratory as a partner for PHEV research, he said.

These companies include General Motors (GM), Ford and A123Systems. In addition, Mike Duoba, mechanical engineer in the Argonne Transportation Technology R&D Center (TTRDC), chairs a committee of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) dedicated to determining test procedures for establishing mileage estimates for PHEVs.

PHEVs are hybrid electric vehicles with a battery that can be recharged using a standard 110 volt (V) electrical outlet. Like conventional hybrids, PHEVs use both a battery-powered motor and a gasoline-powered engine. Unlike conventional vehicles, whose estimated mileage varies based on how aggressively the car is driven, plug-in hybrids can get better mileage with lower daily use.

Because most car owners will drive more on some days than others, car companies need to calculate mileage approximations that will reflect the hybrid's average performance under actual driving conditions, Argonne said. In order to determine these guidelines, the SAE turned to Duoba and his colleagues in the vehicle systems section to develop a test procedure for determining advertised fuel economy.

Because the SAE includes representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and automakers in the U.S., Europe and Japan, "the chances are that the test procedures that we develop at Argonne will be adopted as the industrywide recommended practice for determining what the labeled fuel economy is going to be," Keller said.

Argonne's transportation researchers have developed fuel economy test procedure industry standards and have used them to run tests on new components and vehicles. A123Systems enlisted Argonne's help in testing its new PHEV Toyota Prius aftermarket retro-fit module based upon its lithium-ion batteries.

Researchers in the TTRDC have assessed these packs in a vehicle under various driving conditions, providing a performance result that the company will use to market its product and compare with any future advancements.

Several large automakers, including GM and Ford, have already produced small fleets of prototype plug-in hybrid vehicles for testing. To assist with data collection during the experimental trials, Argonne will supply these companies with the Argonne real-time data acquisition unit (ARDAQ), which uses global positioning systems (GPS) and other sensors to take moment-by-moment measurements of vehicle performance, including driving speed, fuel consumption, frequency of charges and trip length.

The ARDAQ unit is "smaller, lighter, easier to install and cheaper than all the other methods for automotive data collection on the market today," Keller said, and it can record up to a month's worth of data on a memory stick.

The research was funded by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Vehicle Technologies Program.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL).