Online energy management system for a fuel cell/battery hybrid system with multiple fuel cell stacks

Fuel cell (FC)/battery hybrid systems have attracted substantial attention for achieving zero-emissions buses, trucks, ships, and planes. An online energy management system (EMS) is essential for these hybrid systems, it controls energy flow and ensures optimal system performance. Key aspects include fuel efficiency and mitigating FC and battery degradation. This paper proposes a health-aware EMS for FC and battery hybrid systems with multiple FC stacks. The proposed EMS employs mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) to control each FC stack in the hybrid system independently, i.e., MIQP-based individual stack control (ISC), with significant fuel cost reductions, FC and battery degradations. The proposed method is compared with classical dynamic programming (DP), with a 2243 times faster computational speed than the DP method while maintaining nearoptimal performance. The case study results show that ISC achieves a 64.68 % total cost reduction compared to CSC in the examined scenario, with substantial reductions across key metrics including battery degradation (4 %), hydrogen fuel consumption (22 %), fuel cell idling loss (99 %), and fuel cell load-change loss (41 %)