An integrated control strategy for electric road vehicles equipped with fuel cells

Nowadays there is an increasing interest in road vehicles with no emissions, with special application to urban transport systems, either public or private. In this scenario, electric vehicles equipped with fuel cell systems are being more developed. Despite this, the state of the art in fuel cells manufacturing presents some operative problems not solved in using fuel cells. Because of these problems there is the necessity to use either an electronic device at the output of the fuel cells or an auxiliary power device. A power plant for electric road vehicles, equipped with fuel cells, is considered. The optimal configuration of the system, by using batteries as auxiliary energy source, has been analyzed. The whole system has been dimensioned for a particular application and has been modeled for the implementation of numerical simulation. An integrated control strategy is proposed to manage all the components of the system to obtain a voltage control and the regulation of the load network. The proposed control strategy is implemented in simulation and the results are discussed considering the system response to power load request. Moreover, by using components of industrial production, an easy and cheap solution of the problem of voltage drop on the AC network is defined.