Ke Zou

Energy management strategies for hydrogen fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles (FCHEVs) are a key factor in achieving real-time vehicle energy optimization control, vehicle driving economy, and fuel cell durability. In this paper, for an FCHEV equipped with a fuel cell and supercapacitor, the quantitative information, logic rules, and operational constraints are transformed into linear integer inequalities according to its different operating modes, and the Hysdel language is used to establish its mixed logic dynamic model (MLD). Then, the energy management strategy based on model predictive control (MPC) is developed using the MLD model as the prediction model and the equivalent hydrogen consumption and the performance degradation of the fuel cell as the optimization performance indexes. Finally, under the World Light Vehicle Test Cycle, a joint simulation was carried out with Advisor and Simulink to verify the proposed strategy’s superiority by comparing it with the power following control strategy (PFCS) and the compound fuzzy control strategy (CFCS). The results show that the strategy not only ensures real-time FCHEV energy control, but also reduces hydrogen consumption by 10.98% and 1.98% and the number of start/stop times of a fuel cell by six and four, compared to PFCS and CFCS, respectively, which improves the economy of the whole vehicle as well as the durability of the fuel cell.

Fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles have the advantages of zero emission, high efficiency and fast refuelling, etc. and are one of the key directions for vehicle development. The energy management problem of fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles is the key technology for power distribution. The traditional power following strategy has the advantage of a real-time operation, but the power correction is usually based only on the state of charge of a lithium battery, which causes the operating point of the fuel cell to be in the region of a low efficiency. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a hybrid power-following-fuzzy control strategy, where a fuzzy logic control strategy is used to optimise the correction module based on the power following strategy, which regulates the state of charge while correcting the output power of the fuel cell towards the efficient operating point. The results of the joint simulation with Matlab + Advisor under the Globally Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Cycle Conditions show that the proposed strategy still ensures the advantages of real-time energy management, and for the hydrogen fuel cell, the hydrogen consumption is reduced by 13.5% and 4.1% compared with the power following strategy and the fuzzy logic control strategy, and the average output power variability is reduced by 14.6% and 5.1%, respectively, which is important for improving the economy of the whole vehicle and prolonging the lifetime of fuel cell.