Nonlinear adaptive sliding mode control of a powertrain supplying Fuel Cell hybrid vehicle

This paper presents an adaptive sliding mode based switching scheme for controlling DC-DC hybrid powertrain for propulsion of a fuel cell /supercapacitor hybrid vehicle. After modeling the powertrain, a new approach to determine a nonlinear sliding surface ensuring stability of the DC/DC boost converter is discussed. This was achieved without introducing the equivalent control aspect after transforming the instantaneous model of the boost in a suitable form. The presented technique is also applied for trajectories tracking in the entire powertrain, which includes a DC/DC Boost converter associated to fuel cell stack and another bidirectionnel DC/DC converter associated to the supercapacitor bank, which are both working in parallel to provide electricity propelling the vehicle. The control scheme is tested with driving cycle example through simulation.