Double Planetary Gear (PG) power-split hybrid powertrains have been used in production vehicles from Toyota and General Motors. Some of the designs use clutches to achieve multiple operating modes to improve powertrain operation flexibility and efficiency at the expense of higher complexity. In this paper, an automatic modeling and screening process is developed, which enables exhaustively search through all designs with different configurations, clutch locations and operating modes. A case study was conducted based on the configuration used in the model year 2010 Prius and Camry hybrids. It was found that by adding clutches, fuel economy can be improved significantly for plug-in hybrid (charge depletion) operations.

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