Control of a Hydraulic Hybrid System for Wheel Loaders

Sammanfattning: In recent years many companies have investigated the use of hybrid technology due to the potential of increasing the driveline’s efficiency and thus reducing fuel consumption. Previous studies show that hydraulic hybrid technology can be favourable to use in construction machinery such as wheel loaders, which often operate in repetitive drive cycles and have high transient power demands. Parallel as well as Series hybrid configurations are both found suitable for wheel loader applications as the hybrid configurations can decrease the dependency on the torque converter. This project has investigated a novel hydraulic hybrid concept which utilizes the wheel loaders auxiliary pump as a supplement to enable both Series and Parallel hybrid operation. Impact of accumulator sizes has also been investigated, for which smaller accumulator sizes resembles a hydrostatic transmission. The hybrid concept has been evaluated by developing a wheel loader simulation model and a control system based on a rule-based energy management strategy. Simulation results indicate improved energy efficiency of up to 18.80 % for the Combined hybrid. Moreover, the accumulator sizes prove to have less impact on the energy efficiency. A hybrid system with decreased accumulator sizes shows improved energy efficiency of up to 16.40 %.