Energy Management Strategies for Fuel Cell-Battery Hybrid AUVs

This paper presents a comparison of different energy management strategies (EMS) for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) with fuel cell-battery hybrid power systems. Sophisticated EMS can decrease energy consumption, limit fuel cell degradation or increase reliability. EMS for hybrid vehicles have been studied extensively in the automotive industry where standardised drive cycles are applied. As for AUVs, there are no standard drive cycles and power profiles can vary significantly depending on the type of mission. In this study, rule-based and optimization-based EMS are compared. The rule-based strategies rely on deterministic rules and fuzzy logic, the optimization-based strategies minimize a constrained cost function to efficiently split the power demand. The EMS are evaluated against a previously sampled power profile of a Hugin 3000 AUV. The evaluation against real power profiles adds significant value to this study.