Ultracapacitor Boosted Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle

Ultracapacitor Boosted Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle. (August 2009) Bo Chen, B.S., Wuhan University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Mehrdad Ehsani With the escalating number of vehicles on the road, great concerns are drawn to the large amount of fossil fuels they use and the detrimental environmental impacts from their emissions. A lot of research and development have been conducted to explore the alternative energy sources. The fuel cell has been widely considered as one of the most promising solutions in automobile applications due to its high energy density, zero emissions and sustainable fuels it employs. However, the cost and low power density of the fuel cell are the major obstacles for its commercialization. This thesis designs a novel converter topology and proposes the control method applied in the Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicles (FCHVs) to minimize the fuel cell’s cost and optimize the system’s efficiency. Unlike the previous work, the converters presented in the thesis greatly reduce the costs of hardware and energy losses during switching. They need only three Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) to smoothly accomplish the energy management in the cold start, acceleration, steady state and braking modes.