A comparative analysis of fuel cell vehicle architectures

A comparative analysis of the plug-in fuel cell vehicles (PFCV) is studied regarding different topologies, drive cycles and control strategies. To improve the performance of the PFCV, an optimization strategy is proposed at first by regulating the power distribution between the battery and the PEMFC system. Then, a direct multiple shooting (DMS) algorithm is used to solve this nonlinear programming problem (NLP) over spatial domain. In view of two topologies of the PFCV, the proposed strategy is compared with the charge-depleting charge sustaining (CDCS) strategy based on four drive cycles. Simulation results demonstrate that, for those cycles of frequent braking operations, the proposed strategy is able to reduce the hydrogen consumption as well as the on-off switching frequency of the PEMFC system. However, the CDCS strategy shows better PFCV's total efficiency than the proposed strategy for all drive cycles, and achieves a slight reduction of the hydrogen consumption for the high speed drive cycles with less braking operations.