Design and simulation of a fuel cell hybrid emergency power system for a more electric aircraft: Evaluation of energy management schemes

As the aircraft industries are moving toward more electric aircraft (MEA), the electrical peak load seen by the main and emergency generators becomes higher than in conventional aircraft. Consequently, there is a major concern regarding the aircraft emergency system, which consists of a ram air turbine (RAT) or air driven generator (ADG), to fulfill the load demand during critical situations; particularly at low aircraft speed where the output power is very low. A potential solution under study by most aircraft manufacturers is to replace the air turbine by a fuel cell hybrid system, consisting of fuel cell combined with other high power density sources such as supercapacitors or lithium-ion batteries.

To ensure the fuel cell hybrid system will be able to meet the load demand, it must be properly designed and an effective energy management strategy must be tested with real situations load profile. This work aims at designing a fuel cell emergency power system of a more electric aircraft and comparing different energy management schemes (EMS); with the goal to ensure the load demand is fully satisfied within the constraints of each energy source. The fuel cell hybrid system considered in this study consists of fuel cell, lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors, along with associated DC-DC and DC-AC converters. The energy management schemes addressed are state-of-the-art, most commonly used energy management techniques in fuel cell vehicle applications and include: the state machine control strategy, the rule based fuzzy logic strategy, the classical PI control strategy, the frequency decoupling/fuzzy logic control strategy and the equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS). Moreover, a new optimal scheme based on maximizing the instantaneous energy of batteries/supercapacitors, to improve the fuel economy is proposed. An off-line optimization based scheme is also developed to ascertain the validity of the proposed strategy in terms of fuel consumption.

The energy management schemes are compared based on the following criteria: the hydrogen consumption, the state of charges of the batteries and supercapacitors and the overall system efficiency. Moreover the stress on each energy source, which impacts their life cycle, are measured using a new approach based on the wavelet transform of their instantaneous power. A simulation model and an experimental test bench are developed to validate all analysis and performances.

The main results obtained are as follows: the state machine control scheme provided a slightly better efficiency and stresses on the batteries and supercapacitors. The classical PI control and the proposed scheme had the lowest fuel consumption and more use of the battery energy. As expected, the lowest fuel cell stress and lowest use of the battery energy was achieved with the frequency decoupling and fuzzy logic scheme, but at the expense of more fuel consumption and lower overall efficiency. The DC bus or supercapacitor voltage was maintained nearly constant for all the schemes. Also, the proposed strategy performed slightly better than the ECMS in terms of efficiency and fuel consumption, with an increase in fuel economy by 3 %.

The energy management scheme suitable for a MEA emergency system should be a multischeme EMS such that each scheme is chosen based on a specific criterion to prioritize. As an example, depending on the operating life of each energy source, the energy management strategy can be chosen to either minimise the stress on the fuel cell system, the battery system or supercapacitor system, hence maximizing the life cycle of the hybrid power system. Also if the target is to reduce the fuel consumption, the proposed or the classical PI strategies are better alternatives.