Predictive Control for battery performance improvement in hybrid PEM fuel cell vehicles

This paper presents a hybrid control for PEM fuel cell vehicle. The main goals of this controller are the improvement of battery performance taking into account operational modes such as charge control, continuous discharge and step discharge, and also including fuel cell switching on-off constraints. The problem proposed, which has been successfully implemented, implies handling with continuous and discrete variables and constraints. Regarding the control strategy, the controller tracks motor power demand and keeps batteries close to the state of discharge, which is adequately chosen in order to obtain the most efficient performance. Moreover, nonlinear and linear models of the vehicle have been developed and particularized for a laboratory prototype in order to allow future real implementation of the hybrid control design. Finally, the simulation results are illustrated in several figures which depict the control performance for different driving cycle and initial conditions.