Assessment of Energy Management in a Fuel Cell/Battery Hybrid Vehicle

The energy management strategy plays a major role in hybrid platforms powered by fuel cells (FCs) and batteries. This paper presents an assessment of energy management focused on fuel economy and battery degradation. Particularly, a proposed heuristic strategy and the widely known equivalent consumption minimization strategy are compared with the optimal solution obtained offline via dynamic programming. The case study is based on a real FC hybrid vehicle. Accordingly, the powertrain model of the vehicle used for the simulations is validated experimentally, and the profile of the power demand is measured from the real application. The results show that the proposed strategy offers the same performance as the equivalent consumption minimization strategy when the battery degradation is prioritized, and in comparison with the optimal off-line solution, it can be seen that there is still margin for improvement in terms of battery degradation.