This is a long report written by me and two fellow students for an university technical writing course. The report was the main project for the course and it took my group two months to finish the entire report. I wrote the introduction, conclusion, and two of the discussion sections, plus I had some part in the editing process. The topic of the report is hybrid electric propulsion systems that power hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius. Our report mainly focuses on the different configurations of hybrid systems used in production vehicles, so it isn’t an all encompassing literature on hybrids, nor will it be the best thing you’ve ever read. However, we did manage to get a pretty good grade on this report, so it can’t be all bad.
Hybrid Electric Propulsion Systems
By X. T. Jiang, H. Hediyeh, and S. Lee
ABSTRACT
This report presents our investigation regarding hybrid electric propulsion systems. The main purpose of this report is to compare the three models of hybrid electric configurations used in modern vehicles: series, parallel, and series-parallel. A “general concepts” section is also included to provide background information to the readers. Due to time and length constraints, this report only presents an overview into hybrid electric propulsion systems and the three popular configurations.
We used various sources of information to complete this project. These sources include journal articles, websites, and books. The books were obtained from the university science and engineering library and the journal articles were retrieved from online databases.
After our research on the three configurations, we came to the following conclusions regarding the three hybrid configurations:
Series:
The strengths of this design lie in its efficiency for stop-and-go driving situations. This makes the series system suitable for urban vehicles.
Parallel:
This system operates well under highway conditions and it is the cheapest to manufacture out of the three systems. These facts make the parallel configuration the easiest to integrate into an existing automobile design.
Series-Parallel:
The combination of both series and parallel allows the series-parallel configuration to function at optimum efficiency under both city and highway conditions. Therefore this system is possibly the best performing and most versatile hybrid configuration.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 Introduction
2.0 General Hybrid-Electric Concepts
3.0 Series Hybrid
4.0 Parallel Hybrid
5.0 Series-Parallel Hybrid
6.0 Conclusion and References