Descripció del projecte
The PhD project called “Optimization and control of multiple fuel cell systems” aims to contribute to the decarbonization of heavy-duty transportation through research on optimal operating strategies for commercial fuel cell vehicles.
The work is being jointly supervised by the “Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial” of UPC Barcelona and by Robert Bosch GmbH.
In literature, many operating strategies exist for the energy management of FCEVs, mostly focusing on the power distribution between FCS and battery [1]. These approaches can be optimization-based, rule-based, or flatness-based.
There also exist a variety of approaches of operating a single fuel cell system optimally (mainly preventing reactant starvation) including classical feedback control, adaptive control, flatness-based approaches, MPC, neural networks and fuzzy logic [2].
An earlier dissertation showed the potential of optimizing the operating strategy over several system levels [3]. However, there are still several research gaps in this area.
The use of multiple fuel cell systems in heavy-duty applications offers additional degrees of freedom for the operating strategy. There exist several approaches in literature to distribute the power between the FCS, however most of them are simple rule-based approaches or use stationary optimization [4].
A multi-objective optimization strategy that coordinates optimal operation across the described system levels is not yet present in the literature.
Research questions:
– Which control engineering approaches are suitable for a multi-stack or multi-system?
– Which control architectures are suitable for designing operating strategies across
multiple system levels characterized by different time-scales?
– How can an adaptation of operating strategies to varying operating conditions (e.g.,
environment, system degradation) be achieved?
– How generic are the investigated operational strategy approaches with respect to varying
system topologies? Which methods are particularly suitable to be applicable to different
system designs with little adjustment effort?
– How can optimization-based operating strategies for multi-stack systems be implemented
in real time?
Based on literature research, the available system knowledge and the available models, different solution approaches are to be compared and evaluated according to criteria such as control performance, computational complexity, robustness and genericness in terms of system design.
The best concepts are to be implemented and investigated in more detail by means of simulation. For this purpose, the necessary tool chains and models are to be created.
For the development of the general concept, a representative selection of the relevant influencing parameters and their variance, such as use cases, the topologies, the system design, the optimization objectives, and the operating conditions, shall be defined and agreed upon.
The developed concept is to be implemented exemplarily on a multi-FC system at a test bench.
Due to the complexity of the subject and the many influencing parameters, a modular design of the tool chains and models, a structured working method, ongoing documentation and effective communication between the parties involved are important.
[2] W. R. W. Daud, R. E. Rosli, E. H. Majlan, S. A. A. Hamid, R. Mohamed, and T. Husaini, “PEM fuel cell system control: A review,” Renewable Energy, vol. 113, pp. 620–638, Dec. 2017.
[3] S. Hahn, Modellbasierte Betriebsstrategie für PEM-Brennstoffzellensysteme. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2023.
[4] S. Zhou et al., “A review on proton exchange membrane multi-stack fuel cell systems: architecture, performance, and power management,” Applied Energy, vol. 310, p. 118555, Mar. 2022.
