Evaluation of Fuel Cell Vehicle Regarding Hybridization Degree and Its Impact on Range, Weight and Energy Consumption

PUMA Mind is a co-funded project aimed at enhancing the understanding of the behavior of fuel cell sys tems in vehicles taking advantage of the new freedoms in design that electric powertrains provide. Within this project, IDIADA focused on the integration of fuel cell systems in the automotive sector and the resulting fuel cell power demand pro files were used as base line to develop the fuel cell technology within the scope o f the project. This paper presents a further study on the PUMA Mind vehicles with the simulation software for Simulink environment ve mSim developed at IDIADA. The paper deals with the sizing of a pure fuel cell vehicle, a hybrid fuel cell vehicle and a plug-in h ybrid fuel cell vehicle. For each case, a dynamic v ehicle model and an energy management algorithm were implemented in vemSim in order to calculate the required energy storage and optimize the powertrain efficiency and range in a variety of real driving c onditions. Finally, simulations results were used t o evaluate the impact of the hybridization degree on vehicle weight, components size, hydrogen and electric consumption and variabi lity of the fuel cell and battery load. Those results unveil that all typologies of h ybridization mentioned in the following paragraphs reach the target of range and obtain good performances according to different mission pr ofiles.