Seite - (000011) - in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Chapter 1 Trends and Hybridization Factor for Heavy-Duty Working Vehicles Aurelio Somà Additional information is available at the end of the chapter http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.68296 Abstract Reducing the environmental impact of ground vehicles is one of the most important issues in modern society. Construction and agricultural vehicles contribute to pollution due to their huge power trains, which consume a large amount of petrol and produce many exhaust emissions. In this study, several recently proposed hybrid electric archi- tectures of heavy-duty working vehicles are presented and described. Producers have recently shown considerable attention to similar research, which, however, are still at the initial stages of development. In addition, despite having some similarities with the automotive field, the working machine sector has technical features that require specific studies and the development of specific solutions. In this work, the advantages and dis- advantages of hybrid electric solutions are pointed out, focusing on the greater electro- mechanical complexity of the machines and their components. A specific hybridization factor for working vehicles is introduced, taking into account both the driving and the loading requirements in order to classify and compare the different hybrid solutions. Keywords: hybrid, electric driveline, working vehicle, hybridization factor 1. Introduction Over the past decades, the efficiency of vehicles has become a highly discussed topic due to pollution regulation requirements. Modern internal combustion engines (ICEs) have already reached remarkable performances compared with the engines of the early 1990s. However, they are still unable to consistently reverse the growth trend in pollutant emissions because the number of vehicles is also constantly increasing [1, 2]. The European Union first intro- duced mandatory CO2 standards for new passenger cars in 2009 [3] and set a 2020-onward target average emission of 95 g CO2/km for new car fleets. The automotive industry devotes © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.