Thermal management control strategy of liquid-cooled fuel cell vehicle

Abstract

The thermal management of proton exchange membrane fuel cells is an essential guarantee for the smooth operation of fuel cell vehicles. Most typical fuel cell cooling systems are controlled by threshold control, resulting in a strong coupling relationship between the inlet temperature and the difference of temperature between import and export. To address this problem, this paper proposes a decoupled control strategy and establishes a pump flow controller and a Fuzzy-PID fan controller. According to the fuel cell parameters, a Simulink-GT fuel cell cooling system model is built to verify the optimization strategy in the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) and compared with the traditional threshold control strategy. The results show that the decoupled control strategy works well under the NEDC cycle test conditions. The fuel cell temperature can be stabilized around the set target value at all times, keeping the fuel cell operating in the high-efficiency range.

Keywords

• Fuel cell
• Thermal management
• Decoupled control
• Co-simulation