Saturation Management of a Controlled Fuel-Cell/Ultracapacitor Hybrid Vehicle

In this paper, a new control strategy, including saturation management of hybrid fuel-cell (FC)/ultracapacitor (UC) power sources, is described. First, an analysis of hybrid architectures using an FC and UCs for automotive applications is presented. Next, the model and the control strategy are described using energetic macroscopic representation (EMR). The main improvement over classical control strategies of such systems is to take into account saturation management with a dynamic reconfiguration of the energy management strategy (EMS). It includes the regenerative breaking in high state of charge (SOC) of the UC and the supply of a full power demand in low SOC of the UC. Finally, experimental results with small-scale devices show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy using saturation management.