Comparison of passive and active types of proton exchange membrane fuel cell / battery HEVs

The concept of this paper is to compare the performance of a passive and an active hydrogen fuel cell/battery electric vehicles under ECE-40 driving cycle. First, the subsystems of the active vehicle were modeled by low-order dynamics and performance maps. Subsystems include the battery, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), DC/DC converter, vehicle dynamics, traction motor, hydrogen storage system were modeled on the Matlab/Simulink platform. Next, a set of 9 fuzzy rules are designed for energy management. Two inputs are the residual hydrogen and demanded total power while the single output is the power ratio between the battery and fuel cells. Simulation results show that the vehicle simulator is able to evaluate the battery SOC, hydrogen consumption, motor and DC/DC converter efficiencies, fuel cell current and voltage, etc.. Comparing performance of active and passive type vehicles, though the SOC of the active type is 1.97% less than the passive type, the former saves 1.31g hydrogen consumption, where the total hydrogen energy was improved by 9.75%. The comparison of two types of real fuel cell/battery hybrid vehicles will be conducted in the future.