Modeling air conditioning system with storage evaporator for vehicle energy management

Automotive Air Conditioning (A/C) system significantly affects fuel consumption and emission. Thus, Phase Change Material (PCM) is exploited in an innovative storage evaporator to improve the A/C system performance. Due to hybrid features introduced by mode switching when PCM changes its status between liquid and solid, the task of control-oriented modeling is particularly challenging. Upon the energy-based model built, an optimal control problem of an advanced A/C system with a storage evaporator is formulated as to find an optimal clutch command sequence balancing fuel consumption, cabin comfort and drivability constraints. In the scope of vehicle energy management, Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm usually serves as a tool of obtaining benchmark optimal solution, against which results from other optimal algorithms are compared. However, a direct application of DP algorithm to the optimal control problem faces unexpected difficulty, because the discretization of state space is not feasible for an irregular multi-dimensional subspace formed by the multi-mode model. Alternatively, hybrid optimal control theory is pursued and a preliminary study is conducted to illustrate its promising application. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.