Online Energy Management Strategy of Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicles: A Fractional-Order Extremum Seeking Method

In this paper, an online energy management control strategy is proposed based on a novel fractional-order extremum seeking (ES) method. The proposed method is an online adaptive optimization algorithm, which can be effectively used in the applications of fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles. Compared with the traditional integer-order ES method, the presented method uses Oustaloup approximation based fractional-order calculus in order to achieve faster convergence speed and higher robustness. A detailed mathematical analysis of the proposed method is presented to give a stability proof and shows how the fractional-order calculus improves the integer-order ES method. In order to support the stability analysis results and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, a hardware-in-the-loop test bench is developed to provide two experimental case studies. Experimental results show that, by using the presented fractional-order ES approach, the operation points of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack system can be effectively controlled in its maximum efficiency area. In addition, the fuel cell system durability can be improved.