Power Management Methodologies for Fuel Cell-Battery Hybrid Vehicles

The implementation of fuel cell-battery hybrid vehicles requires a supervisory control strategy that manages the power distribution between the fuel cell and the energy storage device (i.e., battery). Several advanced control methods have already been developed and published in literature. However, most control methods have been developed for different vehicle types and using different mathematical models. The performance of these power management methods have not been directly compared for the same application. This study aims at obtaining direct analytical comparisons, which will provide useful insight in selecting a power management method for fuel cell-battery hybrid vehicles. In this paper, the vehicle powertrain components first were modeled mathematically based on a small size vehicle (SAE Baja); the development of two different power management methodologies using either fuzzy logic controller or classical PID controller with a standard driving cycle was introduced and the comparisons of their effectiveness were investigated. The results showed that the power management method with the proposed fuzzy logic control algorithm is more suitable for this application.