A Reduced-Scale Power Hardware-in-the-Loop Platform for Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles

Power Hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) is an important technique for testing a piece of hardware of a power/energy system with real power flows by interfacing it with a real-time simulation model of the system in a closed-loop architecture. This paper proposes and demonstrates a reduced-scale, PHIL platform for a fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) for the purpose of testing the transient power response of the fuel cell system (FCS) and validating the control algorithm of the boost converter used by the FCS in a cost-effective way. The hardware of the PHIL platform is the FCS, while other parts of the FCEV are represented by a real-time simulation model. Preliminary experimental results of the PHIL platform demonstrate that the control algorithm can regulate the boost converter to maintain a desired DC bus voltage. The PHIL platform can be applied to investigate modeling of FCSs and power performance degradation of FCSs caused by driving cycles. A case study of the developed platform is performed to validate a semi-empirical model of an FCS via simulation and experimental data.