A framework for characterizing the ambient conditions experienced by light duty vehicles in the United States

Abstract

The relationship between ambient conditions and light-duty vehicle energy consumption has been widely researched. Relatively little effort, however, has been dedicated to understanding representative ambient conditions a light-duty vehicle may experience. The framework introduced in this article provides a means of quantifying ambient conditions specific to light-duty vehicle operation by incorporating both when and where vehicles are driven. The analysis presented expands the literature beyond solely focusing on temperature; distributions for humidity, solar irradiance, and air density are also included. A procedure is presented that calculates the ambient condition distributions for each metric by relating open-source data sets describing representative vehicle utilization and representative ambient conditions. While this study explores ambient conditions related to light-duty vehicle utilization, the framework may also be applied to separate vocations. Finally, the article concludes with an example use case of the ambient condition weighting process. A binning methodology is introduced that facilitates insight into vehicle energy consumption in response to ambient conditions at the national and local levels while minimizing the number of tests or simulations required.

Keywords:

• Air density
• ambient conditions
• energy consumption
• fuel economy
• humidity
• light-duty vehicle
• real-world
• representative
• solar irradiation
• temperature

Acknowledgments

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308 with Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, the operator of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Hyundai America Technical Center, Inc. under Agreement No. TSA-18-01063.