Comparison of the Series and Parallel Architectures for Hybrid Multi-Stack Fuel Cell - Battery Systems

Multistack fuel cell (MFC) systems provide a level of redundancy that is not available to single stack systems. Depending on the chosen architecture, this redundancy can be used to enable degraded mode operation, act on ageing and/or reduce fuel consumption. This paper presents a comparative study of the series and parallel architectures in the case of an automotive application. Both architectures are evaluated on fuel consumption and ageing. Three driving cycles representing the urban, rural and highway driving styles are used to provide results for different types of use. The simulation results are obtained in a MATLAB - Simulink environment. The results highlight the superiority in ageing of the parallel architecture over the series architecture. However the results exhibits similar behavior for the hydrogen consumption.