Nonlinear adaptive sliding mode control of a powertrain supplying Fuel Cell hybrid vehicle

This paper presents an adaptive sliding mode based switching scheme for controlling DC-DC hybrid powertrain for propulsion of a Fuel Cell / Supercapacitor hybrid vehicle. After modeling the powertrain, a new approach to determine a nonlinear sliding surface ensuring stability of the DC/DC Boost converter is discussed. This was achieved without introducing the equivalent control aspect after transforming the instantaneous model of the Boost in a suitable form. The presented technique is also applied for trajectories tracking in the entire powertrain, which includes a dc/dc Boost converter associated to Fuel Cell stack and another Bidirectionnel dc/dc converter associated to the supercapacitor bank, which are both working in parallel to provide electricity propelling the vehicle. The control scheme is tested with driving cycle example through simulation.