Energy management strategies for a fuel-cell/battery hybrid power system

This article presents a comparative study between the performances of different energy management strategies for hybrid energy storage source supplying electric vehicle. In our case, the hybrid supply is composed of fuel cell as an energy source and lithium-ion batteries as a power buffer. The two storage systems are connected to the DC bus via DC/DC boost converters. The used management strategies influence greatly the hybrid energy storage source performances. For this reason, a new online strategy is developed to improve the fuel consumption and the hybrid source lifetime. The performances (hydrogen consumption and applied stress on each source) of this new strategy are compared with those obtained with literature strategies for 700 km of range. Furthermore, an experimental validation of two online energy management strategies is carried out to validate the simulation results using 1-kW test bench. The experimental results prove that the developed strategy improves hydrogen consumption compared to the frequency strategy and it improves also the lifetime of the hybrid storage system.