Durability and economics investigations on triple stack configuration and its power management strategy for fuel cell vehicles

چکیده مقاله

The durability and cost are the most important bottlenecks in fuel cell vehicle (FCV) commercialization. To alleviate these two drawbacks, a new power management strategy (PMS) is proposed on a triple fuel cell stack configuration (TFSC) to enhance the fuel cell lifetime in a commercialized FCV such as Toyota-Mirai. The two main innovations of the present study are summarized to: (i) lifetime assessing study of the proposed TFSC under the vehicular condition and comparing them with those of single fuel cell stack configuration (SFSC), and (ii) performing an economics analysis to compute and compare the stack costs of triple and single configurations. The lifetime is calculated based on all the operating modes during the combined driving cycle including start/stop cycles, idling or constant potential operation, load cycling, and high current operation. The result reveals that TFSC improves the lifetime by 18.93% compared to the SFSC. It also indicates that during the FCV lifespan, the stack cost of the TFSC is around 14% less than that of the SFSC, which makes triple stack more feasible.