Energy Management Strategy of a PEM Fuel Cell Excavator with a Supercapacitor/Battery Hybrid Power Source

Abstract

Construction machines are heavy-duty equipment and a major contributor to the environmental pollution. By using only electric motors instead of an internal combustion engine, the problems of low engine efficiency and air pollution can be solved. This paper proposed a novel energy management strategy for a PEM fuel cell excavator with a supercapacitor/battery hybrid power source. The fuel cell is the main power supply for most of the excavator workload while the battery/supercapacitor is the energy storage device, which supplies additional required power and recovers energy. The whole system model was built in a co-simulation environment, which is a combination of MATLAB/Simulink and AMESim software, where the fuel cell, battery, supercapacitor model, and the energy management algorithm were developed in a Simulink environment while the excavator model was designed in an AMESim environment. In this work, the energy management strategy was designed to concurrently account for power supply performance from the hybrid power sources as well as from fuel cells, and battery lifespan. The control design was proposed to distribute the power demand optimally from the excavator to the hybrid power sources in different working conditions. The simulation results were presented to demonstrate the good performance of the system. The effectiveness of the proposed energy management strategy was validated. Compared with the conventional strategies where the task requirements cannot be achieved or system stability cannot be accomplished, the proposed algorithms perfectly satisfied the working conditions.

Measurements Based Analysis of the Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Operation in Transient State and Power of Own Needs

“…Delay in reaching the appropriate electric power after a step change in load (decrease or increase of resistance), e.g., by turning the receivers on or off, may result in their incorrect operation. In practice fuel cells are connected to batteries or supercapacitors via a DC/DC converter, in order to eliminate these phenomena [11]. Additional power sources support the operation of the fuel cell in transient states, i.e., provide power if the load increases and get power while reducing the load.…”

“…Considering the possibility of using a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) as the only power source in autonomous installations, one should consider their dynamic properties [10,11]. For devices connected to the network, the dynamics of external devices should also be considered [12].…”

Shearer Height Adjustment Based on Mechanical-Electrical-Hydraulic Cosimulation

“…In recent years, with the rapid development of computer technology, cosimulation technology has been widely used for solving multidomain problems [17], [18]. For instance, the cutting vibration behavior of the continuous miner [19], nonlinear motion behavior of the robot [20][21][22][23], complex fluid dynamics analysis and structural optimization design of variable displacement pump [24][25][26], fuel system design and fuel economy analysis of hybrid cars [27][28][29][30], and other mechanical-hydraulic cosimulations have been performed [31][32][33][34]. There are few literature reports focusing on cosimulation problems with three or more domains.…”

Differential Flatness Based-Control Strategy of a Two-Port Bidirectional Supercapacitor Converter for Hydrogen Mobility Applications

“…As a result, the PEMFC system has to be coupled with energy storage devices to enhance the PEMFC lifespan, store the energy surplus, and maintain safe operation processes [7,8]. Several articles have been reported concerning the hybridization between PEMFCs and batteries or supercapacitors (SCs) for transportation applications [9][10][11].…”