Evaluation of Fuel Cell Vehicle Regarding Hybridization Degree and Its Impact on Range, Weight and Energy Consumption

PUMA Mind is a co-funded project aimed at enhancing the understanding of the behavior of fuel cell systems in vehicles taking advantage of the new freedoms in design that electric powertrains provide. Within this project, IDIADA focused on the integration of fuel cell systems in the automotive sector and the resulting fuel cell power demand profiles were used as base line to develop the fuel cell technology within the scope of the project. This paper presents a further study on the PUMA Mind vehicles with the simulation software for Simulink environment vemSim developed at IDIADA. The paper deals with the sizing of a pure fuel cell vehicle, a hybrid fuel cell vehicle and a plug-in hybrid fuel cell vehicle. For each case, a dynamic vehicle model and an energy management algorithm were implemented in vemSim in order to calculate the required energy storage and optimize the powertrain efficiency and range in a variety of real driving conditions. Finally, simulations results were used to evaluate the impact of the hybridization degree on vehicle weight, components size, hydrogen and electric consumption and variability of the fuel cell and battery load. Those results unveil that all typologies of hybridization mentioned in the following paragraphs reach the target of range and obtain good performances according to different mission profiles.