Energy management of heavy-duty fuel cell vehicles in real-world driving scenarios: Robust design of strategies to maximize the hydrogen economy and system lifetime

Energy management is a critical issue for the advancement of fuel cell vehicles because it significantly influences their hydrogen economy and lifetime. This paper offers a comprehensive investigation of the energy management of heavy-duty fuel cell vehicles for road freight transportation. An important and unique contribution of this study is the development of an extensive and realistic representation of the vehicle operation, which includes 1750 hours of real-world driving data and variable truck loading conditions. This framework is used to analyze the potential benefits and drawbacks of heuristic, optimal, and predictive energy management strategies to maximize the hydrogen economy and system lifetime of fuel cell vehicles for road freight transportation. In particular, the statistical evaluation of the effectiveness and robustness of the simulation results proves that it is necessary to consider numerous and realistic driving scenarios to validate energy management strategies and obtain a robust design. This paper shows that the hydrogen economy can be maximized as an individual target using the available driving information, achieving a negligible deviation from the theoretical limit. Furthermore, this study establishes that heuristic and optimal strategies can significantly reduce fuel cell transients to improve the system lifetime while retaining high hydrogen economies. Finally, this investigation reveals the potential benefits of predictive energy management strategies for the multi-objective optimization of the hydrogen economy and system lifetime. © 2020 The Author(s)