Power Management Strategies for a Fuel Cell/Supercapacitor Electric Vehicle

The development of power and energy management policies in vehicular applications has become an attractive area of research in the last decade. Due to the fact that no single power source fuel cell, batteries or supercapacitor can give the best option in terms of power density during a normal driving of an electric vehicle. In this paper are proposed three novel methods to manage the power in a fuel cell powered electric vehicle by using the vehicle speed, the state of charge of supercapacitor and the dc-link voltage variation. Main result shows that in terms of an average high velocity variation, the voltage control gives a good performance compared with the current control topology. In contrast, during an average slow velocity changes, the current control gives a good performance mainly due to its natural slow response; and the hybrid configuration is suggested when high velocity changes are requested in the driving journey.