Performance and Fuel Economy Comparative Analysis of Conventional, Hybrid, and Fuel Cell Heavy-Duty Transit Buses

With the growing demand from the world community to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide and after a decade of intense research, hybrid electric vehicles (HEV's) appear more viable and necessary than ever before. HEV's offer unprecedented possibilities to achieve higher fuel economy particularly if a proper hybrid configuration is employed. This paper presents performance and fuel economy comparative analysis and simulations of parallel and series hybrid as well as fuel cell transit buses. Simulations were performed for the various heavy-duty buses using the ADVISOR software. A typical conventional bus has also been simulated and analyzed to compare the results. The base configurations from the conventional bus were then scaled to find the performance characteristics of many combinations of fuel converter, power storage, and electric motor. Results show a magnificent improvement in the fuel economy especially in the parallel configuration.