Verification and improvement of flexible mathematical procedures for co-optimizing design and control of fuel cell hybrid vehicles

A study on the usefulness of flexible mathematical tools for determining the optimal architecture of fuel cell hybrid vehicles is presented. Starting from a pre-existing powertrain and control strategies co-optimization tool, the technological (especially in terms of lithium battery type) search domain was first expanded by including an updated battery model. Afterward, the availability of specification independent control strategies was exploited in such a way as to enable two optimization tasks: one relying on previous heuristic control rules and the other based on newly optimized control strategies. The results evidenced negligible differences, in terms of key control variable trends, objective (i.e., fuel economy), and design parameters (i.e., fuel cell system size and battery energy density), thus further proving the tool versatility. Moreover, optimal configurations exhibit appreciable fuel economies and acceleration performance on the WLTP driving cycle, while proposing potentially cost-effective solutions in terms of fuel cell system size. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license