Charge depleting range dynamic strategy with power feedback considering fuel-cell degradation

Abstract

A charge depleting range dynamic strategy considering the fuel-cell degradation is proposed for the plug-in fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles in this paper, to seek the excellent economy performance with various driving ranges. The proposed strategy is developed by means of incorporating an adaptive equivalent factor into equivalent consumption minimization strategy with power feedback control. Firstly, the mathematical modeling of the proposed strategy is formulated to adjust the equivalent factor corresponding to the battery state of charge, which may vary with the forthcoming trip distance to dominate the expected energy consumption. The fuel cell voltage decay rate is applied to the feedback control of the restricted fuel-cell power, which is designed as the degradation model of fuel cell and integrated with the strategy. Secondly, the realization process of the charge depleting range dynamic strategy with restricted power feedback control model is a new attempt to design the real-time control method. Finally, the proposed strategy is validated by a numerical model developed by using the MATLAB/Simulink software and its effectiveness was evaluated by comparing it with the equivalent consumption minimization strategy. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to study the effects of different trip distances. The effectiveness of power feedback control in fuel cell durability is validated through a hardware-in-the-loop experiment. The verified results demonstrate the influence of the equivalent factor on the control process, which makes the proposed strategy possible to provide significant improvement in the economy performance and fuel-cell durability.