Comparative study between different energy storage technologies to design hybrid source supplying urban electric vehicles

In recent years, the Energy Storage Systems field for all electric vehicle applications has attracted many researchers and academic institutions. The main challenge concerns the design in terms of weight, volume, and increasing as possible the hybrid source lifetime. Therefore, increasing the vehicle drive range is very important parameter to facilitate their commercialization.Several storage components can be used to achieve the needed performances as super capacitor, batteries and fuel cell systems. However, fuel cells are energetic components where it is needed to add a powerful element to ensure the power peaks during acceleration and deceleration phases. This paper deals with, a comparative study between fuel cell and battery based power trains for lightweight electric vehicles. A developed algorithm is used to obtain the optimal sizes and constraints of different Energy Storage Systems (ESS) based on fuel cells, batteries and supercapacitors. The comparison between the several systems is based on their costs, volumes, weights and constraints applied to cells. First, to confirm the hybridization benefits we present a comparative study between single and hybrid ESSs according to the desired drive range in terms of energy consumption, weight and cost. Furthermore, in the objective to improve the hybrid ESS performances, different technologies batteries and supercapacitors are tested and their performances will be evaluated. Simulation results show that the desired range influences the choice of storage system technologies for the hybrid enrgy storage system. This results confirm also the interest of hybrid storage system composed with fuel cells and battery for high drive range (>400km).