Design and performance analysis of electric vehicles fed by multiple fuel cells

Recent advances in fuel cell developments have introduced them to many applications such as hybrid electric vehicles and heat/power cogenerations. They bring the advantage of clean energy and decrease the dependency on imported oil by providing fuel efficient devices in many applications such as electric vehicles. Conventional designs of hybrid fuel cell vehicles make use of a single fuel cell power source and a storage device to provide the base load and transients in various driving cycles. This thesis proposes a new configuration of multiple fuel cell power sources in hybrid fuel cell vehicles. Fuel cells are downsized in this new configuration to provide the same amount of power, which brings the advantage of a highly fuel economic design. The power control algorithm for this new configuration is presented and simulation results are studied for a case of double fuel cell power sources. Efficiency analysis for this new configuration is presented and compared with the conventional configuration. The main objective of this thesis is to achieve a higher efficiency in urban driving cycle. In conventional configurations, the fuel cell is not efficiently loaded in urban driving cycles, where small powers were required from the single fuel cell power source. Reliability analysis is also presented for this configuration