PROJECT TITLE: Improving the Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicle Drivetrain by Implementing a Novel Optimal Real-Time Power Management Strategy
A new supervisory control strategy dedicated to the optimal power management of a 3-source (FC-Bat-UC) fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle (FCEV) powertrain will be elaborated and validated in order to improve fuel efficiency without deteriorating performance.
Starting from rule-based strategies, characterized by reduced complexity and computational effort, and combining them with global and multi-objective optimization algorithms to counteract their major drawback of lack of optimality, an appropriate power management controller will be developed to harmonize the often conflicting optimization objectives involved in MPSs, such as the FC fuel consumption, the SoC deviation of the storage components, their aging and cost.
The different operating modes of the MPSs powertrain, each having one or more degrees of freedom, will be selected automatically in successive decision layers, or by driver, depending on driving mode and the real drive cycle characteristics.
The PMS will be first tested with emulated hardware components in a DSpace HiL system, using a standardized drive cycle, and then implemented and finally tested on the existing parallel topology FCEV demonstrator, accomplished in a foregoing
experimental- demonstrative project, whose operation uses now a power-splitting strategy based on a backward model using the fuel cell efficiency map.
The novel PMS will be tested and demonstrated on realistic, unknown driving cycles, opening the door to future innovation.