AeroStrovillos — Microturbine Series Hybrid EV
Microturbine + battery series hybrid for heavy vehicles — simulated from first principles in MATLAB.
Vehicle Class
Battery Chemistries Compared
Validated Against
Tech Stack
The Problem
Heavy trucks and buses burn enormous amounts of diesel, but a large part of that energy is wasted during steady highway cruising where the engine operates far from its most efficient point. Going fully electric isn't viable at this scale — the battery required would be too heavy and too expensive. Could a small turbine acting as a range extender solve it?
The Challenge
Heavy-duty commercial vehicles face a fundamental conflict between range, refueling infrastructure, and battery weight. A pure battery-electric 35-tonne bus requires a pack large enough to sustain steady highway power — but most of that capacity sits unused during low-demand urban segments and incurs significant weight penalty. The goal was to evaluate a series hybrid architecture where a microturbine runs at its optimal operating point as a continuous range extender, with the battery handling only transient peaks and regenerative recovery. The core challenge: prove out the sizing math — how much turbine power, how much battery capacity, and which chemistry (LTO for high power density or NMC for higher energy density) actually satisfies the drive cycle without over-engineering either component.
Simulation Methodology
Series hybrid powertrain for heavy-duty vehicle: continuous micro-range-extender provides base power at peak efficiency while battery handles transient demand peaks and regenerative recovery. System modeled against real urban and highway duty cycles to optimize component sizing and battery chemistry selection.
The simulation is built in MATLAB and structured around real drive-cycle data loaded from Excel time-series sheets. Two cycles are modelled: a short urban cycle and a large mixed-route cycle, each providing per-timestep vehicle speed, required motor torque, instantaneous power demand, and distance. The powertrain model dispatches load across two sources: the microturbine provides steady base power at its best-efficiency operating point to minimise fuel consumption, and the battery pack absorbs or delivers the delta between turbine output and instantaneous demand — charging on regenerative braking, discharging on acceleration peaks. State of Charge is tracked per timestep to validate that the battery never depletes below cutoff across either drive cycle. Battery sizing was evaluated for both LTO (lithium titanate — high cycle life and power density, lower energy density) and NMC (nickel manganese cobalt — higher energy density, more thermal management demand), with required capacity derived from the peak-to-average power ratio observed in the simulation.
MATLAB Data Pipeline
Drive cycle loader — extracts time-series channels from the simulation dataset
Results
The simulation validated the series hybrid architecture for 35T heavy-vehicle operation. Microturbine steady-state dispatch at its peak efficiency operating point, combined with battery buffering of acceleration transients, produced a flatter turbine load profile and reduced total energy consumption compared to direct-drive baselines. The LTO chemistry satisfied the peak discharge rate requirement with less thermal risk; NMC offered a lighter pack for range-dominated routes. Battery sizing outputs from the simulation fed directly into the AeroStrovillos prototype specification, which was presented to TEV stakeholders as the design basis for a physical prototype.
Interested in this work?
Full architecture walkthrough and code review available during interviews.