Use of Supercapacitors, Fuel cells and Electrochemical Batteries for Electric Road Vehicles: A Control Strategy

The paper deals with use of supercapacitors and fuel cells as auxiliary devices of on board energy sources. It shows that they can successfully support current peaks, temporarily requested by electrical road vehicles. The co-action is useful to improve energetic efficiency of the whole driving system and to take longer battery life. These advantages can be really reached in practice only by implementing proper control strategy for the power flow management. The paper suggests one of these techniques and by means of a digital simulation. A sample numerical example is finally given for better explaining the suggested control technique.