An Online Energy Management Strategy For Multi-Fuel Cell Stacks Systems Using Remaining Useful Life Prognostic

This paper presents an adaptive Energy Management Strategy (EMS) designed to distribute the power demand among four small fuel cell modules (short stack + auxiliaries) to extend the lifetime of the entire Multi-Fuel Cell Stacks (MFCS) system and minimize its hydrogen consumption. Indeed, using an MFCS system composed of several fuel cell modules seems to be an up-and-coming alternative, given the various challenges associated with using a single high-powered fuel cell system in a Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicle (FCHEV). These challenges are the short lifetime, reduced reliability, and the narrowness of the energy-efficient operating range of a single fuel cell system. To improve the durability and minimize the hydrogen consumption using an MFCS system, the EMS proposed in this paper is based on dynamic predictions of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of each stack made by a real context prognostic algorithm. The simulations have been carried out in Matlab/Simulink environment. The results showed that the proposed strategy could extend the MFCS system lifetime by about 30% compared to the equidistributional strategy and by about 12% compared to the Daisy-Chain strategy.