Research on the Performance Comparison of Two Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles with Typical Energy Management Strategies

Abstract

In the development of actual vehicles, manufacturers usually adopt a simplified control strategy to ensure the reliability of the control strategy based on the application scenarios. There are two main working modes for the fuel cell system in fuel cell electric vehicles in China. One is the stepped power type, and the other is the following power type. Therefore, the analysis and comparison of these two typical working modes in the power test of fuel cell electric vehicles helps determine how the fuel cell system works in the actual vehicle and how to choose energy management strategies in different application scenarios. We do the actual tests to explore how the two typical control strategies perform in actual vehicles. These two typical control strategies show different characteristics in the same test. It shows that the energy management strategies should be adopted according to the application scenarios and optimization goals. In the stepped power control strategy, the fluctuation of the fuel cell system and the frequency of starting and stopping are significantly reduced, which is beneficial to the durability of the fuel cell system. Compared with the stepped control strategy, the fluctuation of the output power of fuel cell electric vehicles with the following power control strategy increased significantly. At the same time, a simplified state of charge (SOC) test method is proposed. Due to the particularity of the stepped power control strategy, the change of capacity can be used to replace the change of SOC. For the following power control strategy, the change of electric energy can be used instead of SOC changes.