Design and Optimization of a Power Management Strategy for a Fuel Cell-Battery Hybrid Vehicle

The implementation of a fuel cell-battery hybrid vehicle requires a supervisory control strategy that will manage the power distribution between the fuel cell and the battery. Fuzzy logic is one of the most commonly used control methods for this application. However, the disadvantage with this type of control is that there are no clear methods to determining the training data for the fuzzy logic controller and thus, most controllers developed in literature rely on experience in designing the fuzzy logic parameters. This paper presents an alternative local optimization approach that does not require prior knowledge of the driving cycle. In order to validate the effectiveness of the optimization approach, standard performance measures that consider battery life, fuel consumption and system efficiency are developed in this paper. The mathematical system modeling in this paper is based on a small SAE Baja vehicle powertrain. The design process of two different power management strategies (one using fuzzy logic and another using optimization) are presented, the mathematical model is then used to simulate and compare the results obtained from each control method.