A Versatile Load Leveling Method for Fuel cell-based Electric Drive for Vehicular Application

Abstract

This paper presents a flexible power control strategy of a fuel cell (FC)- battery combined hybrid power source fed DC motor drive suitable to be used in electric vehicles which can be capable of working efficiently with an straightforward control method, operating the drive precisely in FC and hybrid modes during the entire drive operation. Although Fuel Cells are very widely accepted by the electric vehicle manufacturing industries, still the power control criterion can be improved to increase overall efficiency. The most appropriate Master Slave Control technique has been implemented to control the modes based on load power requirement and transient operations. The controller with the algorithm guarantees that total load is shared exactly between the two sources all through intense load and transients conditions. Such method inevitably facilitates the fuel cell to work in normal load region throughout transient and steady state by equally sharing the load current between the master and slave converters. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is verified through simulation which is carried out using MATLAB/Simulink software. Investigational tests are carried out using LabVIEW platform with PCI 6251 DAQ I/O interfacing card for viability of the system. FC can be considered as most vital electric power and component of an electric vehicle