An Application of Cost Based Power Management Control Strategies to Hybrid Fuel Cell Vehicles

For fuel cell vehicles to become a commercial reality, a number of challenges must be met including fuel infrastructure, durability, cost, performance, and efficiency. To help address these challenges, hybrid systems that combine fuel cells with an electrical energy storage system such as batteries or ultracapacitors is a potentially important configuration to increase efficiency and extend fuel cell life times by mitigating transient loads. However, the successful implementation of a hybrid fuel cell system requires achieving performance and efficiency benefits that offsets the additional costs, weight, and complexity of the energy storage system. The key to achieving the levels of efficiency required to justify the hybrid system lies in the power management control strategy. To this end, this paper examines the extension of a novel cost based control strategy developed for conventional internal combustion engine hybrid vehicles to a fuel cell platform (Patent WO 02/42110).