The present work proposes a case study about the design and benchmarking of an off-road hybrid vehicle. A preexisting ICE-based platform is converted to a parallel hybrid by replacing the original engine with a downsized unit and by adding an electric motor. This investigation strives to demonstrate the benefits of the hybridization through simulations and factual realization of a prototype. Fuel consumption is assessed both in hybrid and full-electric modes. Moreover, realistic working scenarios are exploited to determine the advantages of the additional functionalities provided by this architecture, namely low speed motion, fine hydraulic pump control and prolonged indoor operation.

Full-electric boats are an expression of recent advancements in the area of vessel electrification. The installed batteries can suffer from poor cold-start performance, especially in the frigid season and at higher latitudes, leading to driving power limitations immediately after startup. At state, the leading solution is to adopt a dedicated heater placed on the common cooling/heating circuit; this implies poor volume, weight, and cost figures, given the very limited duty cycle of such a part. The Heater-in-Converter (HiC) technology allows removing this specialized component, exploiting the power electronics converters already available on board: HiC modulates their efficiency to produce valuable heat (pseudo-cogeneration). In this work, we use the model-based approach to design this system, which requires heating power minimization to fulfill power electronics limitations, while guaranteeing the user-expected startup time to full power. A multistage model is used to get the yearly vessel temperature distribution from latitude information and some additional data. Then, a lumped parameter for the cooling/heating circuit is used to determine the minimum required power as a function of the properties of the thermal interface material used for the battery coupling. The design is validated on a 1:5 test bench (battery power and energy), which demonstrates how the technology can be to scaled up to also fit different boats and battery sizes.