A State Machine Control Based on Equivalent Consumption Minimization for Fuel Cell/Supercapacitor Hybrid Tramway

This paper introduces a state machine control based on the equivalent consumption method for fuel cell/supercapacitor hybrid tramcar is proposed. By the effective combination with a state machine, the coordinate control of multiple power sources enhances the performance of equivalent consumption minimization strategy, increases the fuel cell operating time in a range of high efficiency, and reduces the fluctuation of fuel cell. Moreover, the proposed approach can effectively reduce the hydrogen consumption and keep the system-on-a-chip (SOC) of supercapacitor at a reasonable level. By constructing the RT-LAB semiphysical hardware platform, this method is compared with state machine strategy and equivalent consumption minimization strategy. The hydrogen consumption of the proposed method is reduced by 4.18% compared with the state machine strategy, and reduced by 0.56% compared with the equivalent consumption minimization strategy. Then, the result demonstrates that the proposed method has a better performance. Hence, this new method will have a good application prospect in the high-power hybrid tramway.