Date of Award
8-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Automotive Engineering
Committee Chair/Advisor
Dr. Robert Prucka
Committee Member
Dr. Qilun Zhu
Committee Member
Dr. Benjamin Lawler
Committee Member
Dr. Jiangfeng Zhang
Abstract
Electrification and autonomy are increasingly important for off-road vehicles operating in construction, agriculture, mining, defense, and other demanding environments. These platforms must deliver high tractive power under unstructured terrain, harsh ambient conditions, low-speed operation, and large auxiliary loads. While hybrid and electrified powertrains offer improved efficiency, mobility, and auxiliary power capability, they also introduce significant challenges in managing tightly coupled power, energy, and thermal subsystems. In particular, lithium-ion batteries, power electronics, electric machines, and internal combustion engine-generator systems operate across different temperature limits and timescales, requiring coordinated management to ensure efficiency, durability, and safe operation. This dissertation develops modeling, planning, and robust control strategies for integrated power, energy, and thermal management of autonomous off-road tracked vehicles with hybrid powertrains. The work first establishes the system-level importance of thermal management by quantifying the energy penalty associated with cooling in an off-road series-hybrid tracked vehicle. Under restrictive cooling air-path conditions and extreme ambient temperatures, thermal management is shown to consume a significant portion of vehicle energy, reaching approximately 16% of equivalent fuel consumption in demanding scenarios. These results demonstrate that thermal management cannot be treated as a secondary auxiliary load, but must instead be considered as an integral part of powertrain energy management. To enable predictive and real-time control, this dissertation next develops reduced-order, control-oriented models of key powertrain and thermal subsystems. These include electro-thermal battery models, engine-generator models that capture temperature-dependent fuel consumption and heat rejection, heat-pump models for battery thermal management, and lightweight lithium-plating prediction models for charging constraint estimation. These models preserve dominant physical behavior while remaining computationally efficient enough for repeated use in optimization and supervisory control. Building on these models, a long-horizon Integrated Energy and Thermal Planner is developed to jointly optimize fuel consumption, battery degradation, and thermal management using preview information from autonomous trajectory planning. This planning-layer integration demonstrates that energy and thermal objectives are strongly coupled and that coordinated operation of the engine-generator and cooling actuators can improve system efficiency by up to 29% and battery-life-aware performance compared to conventionally separated energy and thermal management strategies. The dissertation then addresses the multi-timescale nature of real-time vehicle operation through an Integrated Power, Energy, and Thermal Management strategy. This cascaded frame- work combines a long-horizon optimizer for slow energy and thermal states with a fast compensatory controller that responds to transient power demand, preview uncertainty, actuator limits, and modeling mismatch. Hardware-in-the-loop evaluation demonstrates that the proposed strategy maintains constraint-compliant operation under realistic off-road disturbances while achieving near-optimal performance. Compared with a real-time long-horizon benchmark, the proposed framework substantially reduces battery degradation, by up to 70% without significant fuel-consumption penalty and achieves performance comparable to a fine-resolution controller that is computationally infeasible for real-time implementation. Finally, this dissertation investigates resilient thermal management strategies for extreme operating conditions, with emphasis on heat-pump-based battery conditioning and thermal insulation. These technologies are examined as complementary approaches for reducing auxiliary thermal energy consumption, improving cold-weather readiness, supporting long-duration storage, and maintaining batteries within safe and efficient operating limits. Experimental evaluation reveals up to 5x improvement to operation standby times, improved cold-soak warm-up times, reduced cell temperature heterogeneity and 60% reduction to thermal management efforts in extreme cold operating environments. The resulting insights motivate future integration of thermal architecture design with predictive control for fast charging, standby operation, and all-weather electrified mobility. Overall, this dissertation shows that efficient and robust operation of autonomous electrified off-road vehicles requires coordinated treatment of power, energy, and thermal dynamics across multiple timescales. The proposed modeling, planning, and control frameworks provide a pathway toward real-time implementable, physically interpretable, and resilient supervisory control of complex hybrid powertrain systems, with potential applicability beyond off-road vehicles to aerospace propulsion, industrial systems, and other safety-critical electrified platforms.
Recommended Citation
Sundar, Anirudh, "Integrated Power, Energy, and Thermal Management For Autonomous Hybrid Off-Road Vehicles: Multi-Timescale Modeling, Predictive Control, and Resilient Thermal Design" (2026). All Dissertations. 4335.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/4335
Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0005-5790-1808
Included in
Controls and Control Theory Commons, Dynamics and Dynamical Systems Commons, Energy Systems Commons, Heat Transfer, Combustion Commons, Military Vehicles Commons
Comments
This work was supported by Clemson University’s Virtual Prototyping of Autonomy Enabled Ground Systems (VIPR-GS) under Cooperative Agreement W56HZV-21-2-0001 with the US Army DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC).
Disclaimer: Reference herein to any specific commercial company, product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or the Department of the Army (DoA). The opinions of the authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or the DoA and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes.