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The reliance of the commercial transportation industry on fossil fuels has long contributed to pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions. Since full electrification of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles faces limitations due to the large battery capacity required for extended driving ranges, this study explores a Range-Extended Electric Vehicle (REEV) for medium-duty Class 6 pick-up and delivery trucks. This hybrid architecture combines an electric powertrain with an internal combustion engine range-extender. Maximizing the efficiency of REEVs requires an Energy Management Strategy (EMS) to optimally split the power between the two power sources. In this work, a hierarchical EMS is developed through model-based design and validated via Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) simulations. The proposed EMS demonstrated a 7% reduction in fuel consumption compared to a baseline control strategy, while maintaining emissions and engine start frequency comparable to a benchmark globally optimal EMS obtained with dynamic programming. Furthermore, HIL results confirmed the strategy's real-time implementation feasibility, highlighting the practical viability of the controller. This research underscores the potential of REEVs in significantly reducing emissions and fuel consumption, as well as providing a sustainable alternative for medium-duty truck applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, the problem of reducing the energy consumption of the cooling circuit for the propulsion system of an all-electric vehicle is approached with two different concepts: improvement of the powertrain efficiency and optimization of the control strategy. Improvement of the powertrain efficiency is obtained through a modular design, which consists of replacing the electric powertrain with several smaller traction modules whose powers sum up to the total power of the original powertrain. In this paper, it is shown how modularity, among other benefits, also allows reducing the energy consumption of the cooling system up to 54%. The energy consumption of the cooling system is associated with two components: the pump and the fan. They produce a so-called auxiliary load on the battery, reducing the maximum range of the vehicle. In conventional cooling systems, the pump and the fan are controlled with a thermostat, without taking into account the energy consumption. Conversely, in this work a control strategy to reduce the auxiliary loads is developed and compared with the conventional approach, showing that the energy consumption of the cooling system can be reduced up to 27%. To test the control strategy, numerical simulations have been carried out with a 1-D model of the cooling system. On the other hand, all the thermal loads of the components have been calculated with a vehicle simulator, which is able to predict the vehicle's behavior under different driving cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]