Optimal Control of a Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle (FCEV) powertrain

In the mobility industry, the fuel cell technology combined with batteries allows to overcome some of the main pain points of BEV, namely the high recharging time and the high mass of batteries for applications requiring a high amount of energy to fulfil their missions (e.g., bus and heavy-duty vehicles). A fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) powertrain relies on a fuel cell system mainly to fulfil the stationary power demand and on a battery to provide power with higher dynamics and to recover braking energy. The entire powertrain requires an advanced control system to define the power split among fuel cell and batteries, while fulfilling all component and system level constraints. The purpose of this paper is to present a so-called Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for the optimal operations of a fuel cell / battery hybrid powertrain applied to a city bus. The proposed real-time MPC strategy has been designed to optimize the trade-off among hydrogen consumption, battery state of charge (SOC) dynamics, durability of fuel cells and battery, while guaranteeing the fulfilment of all required constraints. A high-fidelity simulation plant, modelled in GT SUITE, has been used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The next steps will include the deployment and validation on a real powertrain in a test bench located in Turin (Italy).