Range Extended Electric Vehicles (REEV) are still one of the suitable concepts for modern sustainable low emission vehicles. REEV is equipped with a small and lightweight unit, comprised usually of an internal combustion engine with an electric generator, and has thus the technical potential to overcome the main limitations of a pure electric vehicle – range anxiety, overall driving range, heating, and air-conditioning demands – using smaller battery: saving money, and raw materials. Even though several REx ICE concepts were designed in past, most of the available studies lack more complex design and optimization approach, not exploiting the advantageous single point operation of these engines. Resulting engine designs are usually rather conservative, not optimized for the best efficiency. This paper presents a multi-parametric and multi-objective optimization approach, that is applied on a REx ICE. Our optimization toolchain combines a parametric GT-Suite ICE simulation model, modeFRONTIER optimization software with various optimization strategies, and a parametric CAD model, that first provides some simulation model inputs, and second also serves for the final designs’ feasibility check. The chosen ICE concept is a 90 degrees V-twin engine, four-stroke, spark-ignition, naturally aspirated, port injected, OHV engine. The optimization goal is to find the thermodynamic optima for three different design scenarios of our concept – three different engine displacements – addressing the compactness requirement of a REx ICE. The optimization results show great fuel efficiency potential by applying our optimization methodology, following the general trends in increasing ICE efficiency, and power for a naturally aspirated concept.

Parallel hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) powertrain topologies are easily applicable on an existing conventional powertrain, and are frequently used in passenger vehicles, with a goal to reduce the overall fleet CO2 emissions, either with mild, full, or plug-in capability. However, for the heavy-duty trucks, the powertrain electrification progresses more slowly. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to evaluate three different hybridization options, together with two electrification options, in comparison with conventional powertrain combined with 5.9 L 6-cylinder diesel internal combustion engine in a heavy-duty 7.5-ton application. All vehicle variants are evaluated in eight vehicle driving cycles replicating different heavy-duty use-cases at different cargo levels, also considering the economical aspect of these different electrification options, calculating the payback periods for each powertrain option. The energy management control strategy, that determines the power split between the ICE and electric motor for HEV variants is an optimal one, based on Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle. All models are programmed in-house in Python 3.9.0.