  Exergy, or availability, is a thermodynamic concept representing the useful
work that can be extracted from a system evolving from a given state to a
reference state. It is also a system metric, formulated from the first and the
second law of thermodynamics, encompassing the interactions between subsystems
and the resulting entropy generation. In this paper, an exergy-based analysis
for ground vehicles is proposed. The study, a first to the authors' knowledge,
defines a comprehensive vehicle and powertrain-level modeling framework to
quantify exergy transfer and destruction phenomena for the vehicle's
longitudinal dynamics and its energy storage and conversion devices (namely,
electrochemical energy storage, electric motor, and ICE). To show the
capabilities of the proposed model in quantifying, locating, and ranking the
sources of exergy losses, two case studies based on an electric vehicle and a
parallel hybrid electric vehicle are analyzed considering a real-world driving
cycle. This modeling framework can serve as a tool for the future development
of ground vehicles management strategies aimed at minimizing exergy losses
rather than fuel consumption.
