Study on operating characteristics of fuel cell powered electric vehicle with different air feeding systems

In this paper the modeling of a fuel cell powered electric vehicle is presented. The fuel cell system consisting of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack and balance of plant (BOP) was co-simulated with a commercial vehicle simulation program. The simulation program calculates the load of the fuel cell depending on the driving mode of the vehicle and also calculates the overall efficiency and each parasitic loss by applying the load in the fuel cell model that is used to estimate the performance of the entire vehicle system by calculating the acceleration performances and fuel economy of the vehicle. Two types of air feeding systems (blower type and compressor type) were modeled by using MATLAB/Simulink environment and the effect of fuel cell stack size (number of cells, cell area) on the fuel economy and performance of the fuel cell powered vehicle was investigated. Using a driving cycle of FTP-75, the required power, BOP component power loss, and system efficiency for two types of fuel cell systems were analyzed. Through this study, we could get a basic insight into the fuel cell powered electric vehicle and its characteristics