Converter control strategies for the power flow management in a fuel-cell supplied vehicle for the public city transportation

Due to the high costs, the fuel cell technology is likely to be applied firstly in the public electrically-propelled vehicles. In a prospective framework, the intrinsic slow response of a fuel cell stack to the load variation could be compensated by conventional electrochemical batteries, which are in turn protected versus the short-time power pulses by super-capacitors. This paper presents a strategy for the power allocation among the different sources, applied to a likely system configuration, and its implementation in a Matlab®–Simulink® model, taking into account the behaviour of all the electromechanical components. The simulations are executed both for a normalized drive cycle and for a more realistic urban running, in order to verify their effectiveness also in a randomly perturbed route.