Test facility for a hybrid fuel cell electric vehicle

The electric vehicle concept is gaining momentum in competing with the internal combustion (IC) based vehicle due to rising fuel prices and demands for alternative energy vehicles. Particularly, fuel cell electric vehicles are gaining attention as a real alternative to the pure IC engine vehicle. Because of this emerging technology, considerable research into the configurations of these fuel cell electric vehicle systems is being considered. The main components include the main power supply, an energy storage system to increase the power density of the system, a DC-DC converter to supply energy to the energy storage system or vehicle accessories and the motor drive. Because these systems are expensive and potentially unsafe when testing new algorithms, there is a need for a static power system test facility. This test facility will include any or all of the components of the actual fuel cell electric vehicle system and can be used to simulate behavior of the system and optimize it. This paper presents such a system that was simulated using MATLABreg Simulink and implemented in hardware for testing of emerging electric vehicle systems at the University of Alabama´s Electro-Mechanical Systems Laboratory (EMSyL).