The research activity of the laboratory of Vehicles for Sustainable Mobility (vsmobility.unisalento.it) is mainly devoted to testing, modeling, and optimization of advanced powertrain for automotive application including hybrid electric power systems with either thermal engines or fuel cells.
The testing includes, on the one hand, the possibility of measuring tailpipe emission with Portable Emissions Measurements Systems, on the other hand, the possibility of implementing and testing online energy management strategies.
The modeling approach is based on cost-efficient but sufficiently accurate models of energy converters (thermal engines, electric machines, fuel cells), energy storage systems (conventional and alternative fuels, batteries, supercapacitors), and energy converters (electrical and mechanical power couplers).
The optimization tools include many-objective optimization of the architecture combined with dynamic optimization of energy management strategies.