A Simple and Safe Strategy for Improving the Fuel Economy of a Fuel Cell Vehicle

A new real-time strategy is proposed in this article to optimize the hydrogen utilization of a fuel cell vehicle, by switching the control references of fueling regulators, based on load-following. The advantages of this strategy are discussed and compared, with advanced strategies that also use the aforementioned load-following mode regulator of fueling controllers, but in the entire loading range, respectively, with a benchmark strategy utilizing the static feed-forward control of fueling controllers. Additionally, the advantages of energy-storage function in a charge-sustained mode, such as a longer service life and reduced size due to the implementation of the proposed switching strategy, are presented for the dynamic profiles across the entire load range. The optimization function was designed to improve the fuel economy by adding to the total power of the fuel utilization efficiency (in a weighted way). The proposed optimization loop will seek the reference value to control the fueling regulator in real-time, which is not regulated by a load-following approach. The best switching threshold between the high and low loading scales were obtained using a sensitivity analysis carried out for both fixed and dynamic loads. The results obtained were promising—(1) the fuel economy was two-times higher than the advanced strategies mentioned above; and (2) the total fuel consumption was 13% lower than the static feed-forward strategy. This study opens new research directions for fuel cell vehicles, such as for obtaining the best fuel economy or estimating fuel consumption up to the first refueling station on the planned road.

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