Sizing and energy management for fuel cell hybrid vehicles with supercapacitors

The sizing and energy management for fuel cell hybrid vehicles with supercapacitors is addressed in this work. The hybridization with high specific energy elements significantly improves the advantages of fuel cells, specially in automotive applications where the load fluctuates considerably. The sizing is based on conductibility requirements while the energy management is based on the knowledge of the fuel cell efficiency map, the state of charge os supercapacitors, and the power constraints to preserve the lifetime. In order to adjust and validate the proposed methodologies, standard driving cycles and long-term stochastic driving cycles are used. The long-term stochastic driving cycles are generated from several standard driving cycles using a Markov model, which is also introduced in this paper. The proposed methodologies show a good performance both in terms of efficiency and reference tracking with very different driving situations.