Increment-oriented online power distribution strategy for multi-stack proton exchange membrane fuel cell systems aimed at collaborative performance enhancement

The multi-stack fuel cell system based on proton exchange membrane fuel cell has gained increasing attraction in high-power transportation applications. However, the real-time coordinated optimization among multiple fuel cell systems still remains a promising problem. To achieve the online collaborative performance enhancement between fuel economy and durability for the parallel multi-stack architecture, an increment-oriented power distribution strategy is proposed in this paper. It is inspired by the quadratic polynomial formulation derived from the hydrogen consumption analysis of integrated fuel cell system. The quantitative correlation between the fuel economy and durability is obtained with analytical power increments. To improve the strategy applicability with fault tolerance, iterative high-order sliding-mode differentiation procedure is utilized in the initial condition determination. Besides, performance-dominated power limits are considered in the global switching sequence calculation. The effectiveness and practicability of the proposed strategy are verified by two designed scenario cases with one-cycle short-term and life-cycle long-term evaluations. Detailed simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can guarantee fault tolerance operation and collaborative performance enhancement for multi-stack fuel cell systems with minimum hydrogen consumption and maximum service life compared with other advanced strategies.

Automated summary

This paper proposes an incremental power distribution strategy for achieving online collaborative performance enhancement between fuel economy and durability in parallel multi-stack fuel cell systems. The strategy obtains a quantitative correlation between fuel economy and durability through analytical power increments and utilizes an iterative high-order sliding-mode differentiation procedure to improve applicability and fault tolerance. The strategy is verified to ensure fault tolerance operation and collaborative performance enhancement in multi-stack fuel cell systems with minimum hydrogen consumption and maximum service life compared to other advanced strategies.