Due to the shortcomings of short life and low power density of power battery, if power battery is used as the sole energy source of electric vehicle (EV), the power and economy of vehicles will be greatly limited [
1,
2]. The utilization of high-power density super capacitor (SC) into the EV power system and the establishment of a battery-super capacitor hybrid power system can achieve complementary advantages to make up for the lack of power battery [
3,
4]. Yi Hongming simulated the important modules of the SC-battery hybrid power system in MATLAB/Simulink. The results show that the hybrid power system can exert its high energy density and high-power density characteristics, thus improving the vehicle’s dynamic performance and energy utilization [
5]. Xu and Wang combined high-power SC with traditional batteries, and adopted parallel interleaving technology in DC/DC converter, which changed the topology of the hybrid power supply, greatly improving the overall performance of the composite power system. The fuzzy control method is used to manage the energy storage system [
6]. Cezar improved the performance of the combined energy storage unit by introducing SC as auxiliary power supply. This paper presents a complete energy storage system model, including a battery, a SC and a rule-based control strategy. When the power required for energy storage is higher than the threshold, the SC is released, which means that the power of the driver needs to be increased for a period of time [
7]. Therefore, a SC with battery hybrid power system is proposed in this paper, which is composed of the battery-super-capacitor hybrids, transmission and the electric motor in this research. Specific efficiency characteristics are displayed by each component of the hybrid power system, which is strongly affected by the power demands according to driving conditions and driver’s intentions. EV with battery-super-capacitor hybrids can attain minimum energy consumption through switching different driving modes according to the high efficiency area of the hybrid power system [
8].
In addition, the rationality of the energy distribution strategy of the composite power system is also an important factor affecting energy consumption. Special efforts have been devoted to the design and implementation of optimal energy management strategies concerning their importance to urban EV. Essentially, existing approaches may be categorized in rule-based control strategies, optimization and intelligent control strategies [
9]. (1) Rule-based methods and analytic methods are usually operation mode dependent. (2) Optimal theory methods can be classified as global optimization and real-time optimization methods, including minimum principle, quadratic programming and dynamic programming (DP) method. (3) Intelligent control methods include neural networks, and model predictive control methods, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithm method, and swarm optimization method [
10]. Rule-based methods have difficulty achieving optimal control effect, but they are simple and easily conducted; real-time application of intelligent control methods are limited because of they involve more calculation and are time-consuming [
11]. Banvait proposed a rule-based energy management strategy for plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), then a PHEV model was built using Advisor software, and the simulation results show that the strategy can significantly reduce fuel consumption [
12]. Hemi proposed a rule-based energy management strategy combined with the equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS), which is developed and simulated by using a dynamic model of the vehicle developed in the Matlab/Simulink environment. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the strategy under various vehicle masses [
13]. Previous research about energy management algorithms are concentrated in the field of energy management algorithm based on optimization. DP is a widely-used method that applies search for absolutely optimal controls under a predetermined driving cycle [
14]. Optimal power management strategy obtained by DP was employed in parallel hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) to minimize fuel consumption [
15]. A finite horizon dynamical optimization problem with constraints of proper energy limits and solved by a DP approach was proposed by Xiaosong Hu, in order to avoid physical damage of the electrical storage system [
16]. A driving pattern recognition technique of switching among the control rule employed in the optimal power management strategy for range extended electric vehicle sets extracted from DP results of each representative driving pattern [
17]. An optimal solution to the energy management problem in fuel-cell hybrid vehicles with dual storage buffer for fuel economy in a standard driving cycle using multi-dimensional dynamic programming (MDDP) was suggested and turned out to be applicable [
18]. An energy management strategy based on stochastic dynamic programming was proposed for a serial hybrid electric tracked vehicle [
19]. DP typically focuses on the energy consumed during the driving event as its objective, with the SOC indicating the state of the system, and either the power split ratio or the torque split ratio as the control variable [
20]. However, the real-time controller based on DP is effective only for the driving cycle that is used for rule extraction [
21]. For the near-optimal rule-based energy split strategy, control rules can also be extracted from the DP results [
22]. In summary, rules-based and DP method used in composite power pure electric vehicles, the existing research shows that the main optimization lies in the optimization of motor control and optimized space can be limited; in this paper, the hybrid power system and motor drive system are comprehensively considered, and the optimal efficiency model of the hybrid power system is established to explore the best feasible scheme of energy utilization for pure electric vehicles.
In order to propose a systematic optimal solution for hybrid power system and energy split strategy, high efficiency areas of hybrid power system under single power and hybrid power modes needed to be rationally distributed. Efficiency characteristics analysis of battery, SC, electric motor and DC/DC converter is a vital part of the solution. Based on simulation and experiment methods, the efficiency formulas of the hybrid power system can be summarized under different working conditions, with vehicle acceleration and velocity as independent variables. It is critical to set the status parameters of battery and SC as constraints of optimization problems, because constraints represent the work status of both energy storage units, and work status directly influences the efficiency of the hybrid power system. In this sense, after analyzing the characteristics of each component of the hybrid power system, the efficiency calculation model of the hybrid power system is established. On this basis, a rule-based energy management strategy is proposed, and then the DP method is used to solve the optimization problem of the optimal energy allocation strategy for the hybrid power system of EV.
The structure of the paper is organized as follows: firstly, the materials and methods are provided in
Section 2, and the structure and the key components models of hybrid power system in EV are presented in
Section 2.1,
Section 2.2,
Section 2.3 and
Section 2.4, which include description of the hybrid power system, battery model, SC model and electric motor; and the rule-based strategy and DP optimization strategy is described in
Section 2.5 and
Section 2.6. In
Section 3, the results and discussions of rule-based energy management strategy and energy allocation optimization strategy based on DP are presented. Finally, conclusions are presented in
Section 4.