Enhancing fuel cell durability for fuel cell plug-in hybrid electric vehicles through strategic power management

Fuel cell plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (FC-PHEVs) can have extended range while utilizing cheap grid electricity, but has poor durability of onboard fuel cells due to dynamic loading. In this study, fuel cell durability is enhanced significantly for a novel configuration of FC-PHEVs with three fuel cell stacks through strategic power management by making each fuel cell stack work only at a fixed operating point (i.e., constant output power) and by shortening its active time (operation) via on-off switching control. A hysteresis control strategy of power management is designed to make the active time evenly distributed over the three fuel cell stacks and to reduce the number of on-off switching. The results indicate that the durability of the onboard fuel cells can be increased 11.8, 4.8 and 6.9 times, respectively, for an urban, highway and a combined urban-highway driving cycle. This enhanced fuel cell durability is derived from the fact that the average power demand of real-time driving cycles is only a fraction of the maximum power that FC-PHEVs could provide, and substantially increased durability can be used to reduce the over-design, hence the cost, of fuel cells.