University of Waterloo's Hydrogen Fuel Cell Choice Meets the Reality of Canada's Winter by Using Model-Based Design

Developing a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in three years is not a trivial task for any group of engineers. It is even worse still when you consider the climate it will be subjected to in Canada. For four months of the year, our vehicle remains inside of a heated garage, away from the cold ice and snow. Actual vehicle data is collected during the eight warm months of the year to construct empirical models. Software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop methodologies were used to tune our vehicles using the models that were constructed using actual vehicle data. Without MATLAB and Simulink from The MathWorks, our winters would be a lot less productive.

In this paper, you will find a brief overview of our vehicle's architecture as well as how model-based design was valuable to our design and inplementation of our vehicle.