Design of an innovative off road hybrid vehicle by energy efficiency criteria

Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2016

The environmental impact of road transport is significant because it is a major user of energy and the major user of the world's petroleum that is extracted every year. This creates air pollution, including nitrous oxides and particulates, and is a significant contributor to global warming through emission of carbon dioxide, for which transport is the fastest-growing emission sector. These impacts assume a particular importance if considered the place where they are emitted such as the cities and highways that develop near the human settlements. By subsector, road transport can globally be considered the largest contributor to global warming. This paper takes into account an effective design methodology, which is based on an effective energy optimization of the vehicle and its main components. This method takes inspiration from constructal law, even if it could not be limited to this. The inspiration is limited to considering the fluxes of different physical magnitudes inside a complex system, such as a vehicle is, and analyzing how they develop and how they develop and mix. This analysis leads to a general analysis to the vehicle and to an effective optimization based on energy principle by a step by step optimization that allows identifying the critical elements that limit the flow of the different magnitudes inside the system, with particular attention to the factor that limits energy efficiency at different scale levels. The components have been considered only if they are industrial grade and inside a modular design, which allows merging design, finalized to energy efficiency, minimization of exergy disruption and of LCA impacts. The emotion that has been caused by the end of the production of the most successful British vehicle that is Land Rover Defender has stimulated to produce a sample design of a vehicle in this class producing different alternatives for different uses. The case of a vehicle that can compete with Discovery in terms of use and specifications has been considered, Results have been surprising demonstrating that the use of industrial grade components and their accurate choice will allow defining new vehicle platforms that can radically improve energy efficiency of vehicles.