I work on development for hybrid vehicles. Especially in recent years, I've been involved with the Advanced Clean Energy Vehicle Project (ACE project) at NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization).
The objective of the ACE (Advanced Clean Energy Vehicle) project for 2003 is to work in cooperation with all the automobile manufacturers in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by developing new vehicles that combine hybrid structure, greatly decreased fuel consumption, clean energy, and after treatment technology for exhaust gases.
At Hino Motors, our goal this year is to come out with a hybrid bus with two times the fuel efficiency compared with our previous heavy duty diesel busses. We brought in five of the DL750 ScopeCorders for development on this new hybrid bus.
The bus under development has a new hybrid system and electrical storage units, and we use the DL750s to capture various signals in that system. For the storage unit we capture cell voltage, module voltage, current, temperature and other signals. In the engine we look at RPM, torque, and controller output signals, and in the hybrid system we measure motor, controller, temperature and many other kinds of signals, all of which undergo subsequent analysis.
Before, when the project was focused on storage research, we used 10 of the DL716 ScopeCorders to measure voltage. The DL716 accepted 16 channels of isolated input, and the long memory of that oscilloscope gave us high resolution that was really convenient for us. We chose the DL750 this time because it carries over the features of the DL716, but has improved long memory, is smaller in size, and adds GP-IB and Ethernet support which we think will be useful in the future.
By hooking up the five DL750s to a notebook PC via GP-IB, we can gather all 80 channels worth of data together using our customized LabVIEW software. We can send measurement commands to the DL750 from the PC, and that really speeds up our work. By gathering various kinds of data measured from the actual vehicle, the DL750 helps us understand what's going on inside the hybrid systems as they operate. During development of the new hybrid bus we analyze everything from the measured RPMs at a given accelerator position to the voltage values in the storage unit to energy consumption, and this lets us determine the most fuel-efficient control conditions for the hybrid system.
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