POWER FLOW MANAGEMENT WITH PREDICTIVE CAPABILITIES FOR A HYBRID FUEL CELL VEHICLE

The hybridization of fuel cell vehicles not only leads to an improved efficiency, but also results in a significant lessening of the dynamic control requirements for automotive fuel cell systems. However, a proper power flow management plays a fundamental role in order to guarantee the optimal performances. In this paper, a two level control architecture is proposed for vehicles equipped with a fuel cell system and a battery. The lower level scheme controls the fuel cell acting on the compressor command and on the back pressure valves of anode and cathode. On the other hand the higher control level is devoted to manage the power flows, that is the power absorbed by the motor and the one provided by the fuel cell. In view of its capability to manage constraints, such as those inherently related to the level of the battery charge, the Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach is used to design the controller acting at the higher level.