Energy management of fuel cell/battery/ultracapacitor in electrical hybrid vehicle

This paper describes an energy management algorithm for an electrical hybrid vehicle. The proposed hybrid vehicle presents a fuel cell as the main energy source and the storage system, composed of a battery and a supercapacitor as the secondary energy source. The main source must produce the necessary energy to the electrical vehicle. The secondary energy source produces the lacking power in acceleration and absorbs excess power in braking operation. The addition of a supercapacitor and battery in fuel cell-based vehicles has a great potential because it allows a significant reduction of the hydrogen consumption and an improvement of the vehicle efficiency. Other the energy sources, the electrical vehicle composed of a traction motor drive, Inverter and power conditioning. The last is composed of three DC/DC converters: the first converter interfaces the fuel cell and the DC link. For the second and the third converter, two buck boost are used in order to interface respectively the ultracapacitor and the battery with the DC link. The energy management algorithm determines the currents of the converters in order to regulate accurately the power provided from the three electrical sources. This algorithm is simulated with MATLAB_Simulink and implemented experimentally with a real-time system controller based on dSPACE. In this paper, the proposed algorithm is evaluated for the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC). The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed energy management algorithm.