Design methodology of fuel cell electric vehicle power system

This paper develops a methodology to optimize the sizing of the power components in a fuel cell electric vehicle from the driving cycle and the specified acceleration performance. The fuel cell and the energy storage system associated (battery or/and ultra capacitor) design parameters are the numbers of series and parallel branches respectively Ns_i and Np_i. They are set so as to minimize an objective function which includes mass, cost and a penalty function. The solution must fulfill the performance requirements and respect the constraints on each power component. The methodology is based on a judicious combination of Matlab-Simulinkreg and a dedicated software tool Pro@Designreg well suited to treat inverse problems. An application in a fuel cell/battery power train illustrates the feasibility of the proposed methodology.