Modeling and Control of Hybrid Electric Vehicles: A Case Study for Agricultural Tractors

To reduce fuel consumption and pollutant emissions, there is an increasing interest in electrification of non-road mobile machinery such as agricultural tractors (ATs). This paper presents a high-fidelity forward model for series hybrid electric agricultural tractors (HEATs). To tackle the control problem caused by the mixed power loads and complicated tractor-implement operations, two benchmarking rule-based power management strategies, thermostat (TC) and power follower control (PFC), are designed and investigated. Based on the typical working cycles, the simulation results show PFC realizes better performance in saving fuels and reducing nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions at the cost of producing more particulate matter (PM).