Any use of assist has to complemented with use of regen. Otherwise you're sort of cheating. You're getting good FE while depleting the battery pack. It's not sustainable. Eventually you have to recharge the batteries and take an FE hit. A legitimate measurement of FE should require an equal SOC at the start and end of the trip.

Under these requirements, I think it's better to avoid any assist and regen (when travelling on a flat course). The HCH's IMA adapts to your power demand. If you press down on the accelerator it tends to give you assist. But after a few seconds the CVT revs up and the assist goes away. I think that if you accelerate gradually enough you can get the engine revs to increase without kicking in any assist. That should be best for FE. When you glide it's the opposite. Gradually let off the accelerator and let the revs settle down without kicking in any regen.

 

I edited my steps.

How does it read now guys?

I'm trying to write a recipe that requires no in-depth understanding.
I want to edit the directions so it is a simple, clear, yet adequate.

 

My P&G method involves getting up to speed and shutting the ICE off completely. Engines don't burn much gas when they are off. NOTE: This is dangerous, don't do it.

 

I gues that depends on how often you pulse and then assist will eat your battery. I have found that when I pulse using assist that I do not use that much battery power. I am able to glide long enough that pulsing does not need to be done that often therefore usuing less power. Also, braking seems to generate more battery power the doing regen while coasting or from the ICE so I am able to usually recharge the power I used soley from long braking.

 

I have also found that my FE benefits more when using cruise control on flat ground. However, P&G is much more beneficial to me on uneven ground that changes altitude, hills and etc. Using crusie on my commute to work with lots of hills kills my mileage.

 

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I have found that accelarting slowly hurts FE. Slow acceleration yields low miles per gallon, usually around 20 on the instant readout. If it takes longer to get to speed at low MPG that will lower your average. Whereas with faster acceleration you may use a little more fuel however, you get to speed faster and then your avg. mpg does not suffer. The longer the car is at lower MPG, which I considerd anything under 50 MPG on the instant, the lower your average. The key is to keep the car out of the lower range as much as possible.

 

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In my terrain this is not too hard to deal with because I'm not really cheating, I'm just waiting until a hill comes along where i can take full advantage of the free momentum to charge the battery. This way you're using the battery as a buffer until the next big downhill. If you don't use as much battery as you can before that downhill then you'll end up wasting the downhill because the battery will recharge before you're done with the regen potential.

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The point was to find out if it helps or not, like I said it was an experiment and I didn't see much improvement. It does work in some situations like when expecting long downhills and such, but if you try to do it full scale it doesn't really work.

I do have good results though if I take a REALLY slow decel, like just lifting my foot off the gas a little bit to slow down 5-10 mph over a mile or two rather than full-out coasting, but I don't think that's really pulse and glide is it? Plus it doesn't add a lot for the extra effort it requires.

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I didn't mean to suggest that exactly, what I meant was that that's where the optimal rpm could be expected to reside - not the full range but some particular point within it. I don't know that exact point for this engine so that's why I guestimated the range it might be within based on figures I have heard for other small engines.

 

I think there is something to accelerating more quickly in the pulse in some scenarios. Consider the case where you are sitting at an intersection and the light turns green. You know you have a stop sign coming up 1/4 mile down the road. You have two choices, you can accelerate gently and switch to the glide halfway to the stop sign, or you can accelerate more quickly and spend more time in the glide. Granted, you do get lower MPG during the pulse, but the pulse is shorter, plus the glide is infinite MPG, so stretching the glide has a bigger impact on the overall average than the lower MPG during the 'fast pulse'. The experiments I have done (like this one and these) so far seem to support this conclusion.

If you are on a flat, open road with no stops and no traffic, then gradual acceleration with no assist will probably get the best FE, but I think there are certain situations where a stonger pulse works better. The moral is that you have to adapt your rate of acceleration to the situation at hand.

IMHO. As usual, testing is in progress