Experental Energy Management of Hybrid Fuel Cell/Battery System

This paper treats the sizing and Energy Management (EM) of Fuel Cell/battery source for automotive application. The fuel cell system is used as the main source and batteries pack is the auxiliary one. A bidirectional DC/DC converter is used to connect the batteries to the DC bus and a DC/DC boost converter associates the fuel cell stack with DC link. A sizing algorithm is developed to determine the Energy Storage System (ESS) sizes. The proposed sizing approach and simulations results leads to show satisfied results regards weight, volume and cost. An online EM strategy is used to manage the power between the main and the auxiliary source by determining the power profile of each one. This strategy is based on frequency splitting, it takes into account the slow dynamics of FC and the batteries constrains. Experimental energy management for developed hybrid FC/Battery system of ESTACA is presented. Experimental results lead to confirm the efficiency, robustness and stability of the proposed approach regrading dynamic performances during power demand, and regenerative braking.