Modeling, optimization and control of a FC/battery hybrid locomotive based on ADVISOR

This paper presents a hybrid locomotive system which combines proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) as primary energy source for its advantages of high efficiency and low emissions, and Pb acid battery as secondary energy storage (ESS) to supplement the output of FC during acceleration or whenever else needed and to absorb regenerative energy during braking. Advanced Vehicle Simulator (ADVISOR), a vehicle simulating software, is secondly developed in this paper for the locomotive modeling and simulation. An analysis of simulation is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. Then the power of FC, battery and motor are optimized by adopting bisection algorithm under certain constraints. It is confirmed that the dynamic performance and economy performance are improved after optimization. An advanced energy management system is extremely necessary to contribute the demand power of locomotive between energy sources in a suitable way, therefore a fuzzy logic based control strategy is proposed for the hybrid locomotive. With advantages of easy understanding, flexibility and capability to deal with imprecise data, fuzzy logic methodology is suitable for the control of hybrid locomotive. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of fuzzy logic energy management system in terms of dynamic and economy performance.