Hybrid Energy Management Strategy for Fuel Cell Ships Considering the Sailing Conditions

There exist long-standing requirements of energy saving and stable operation for fuel cell ship power system. In this paper, a rule-optimization fusion energy management method based on the discrimination of ship operating conditions is proposed. Specifically, the ship sailing conditions are analyzed and the conditions discriminant mechanism based on the demand power data is established. To reduce the output power fluctuation of fuel cell (FC), the rules control and genetic algorithm optimize fusion of the energy management strategy is designed by taking the extreme value and change rate of power data under different sailing conditions as threshold values. To improve the influence of FC efficiency characteristics on energy efficiency, the different power constraint intervals are set for different sailing conditions by comparing the total hydrogen consumption in different power constraint intervals. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the output power fluctuation of FC, and the effectiveness of fuel cell ships is verified by comparing the conventional power constraint interval, where hydrogen consumption decreased by 4.26%.