Energy Management Strategy Under Fuel Constraints for Battery–Fuel Cell-Powered All-Electric Aircraft

Sustainable aviation is an ever-growing field, with feasibility, safety, and longevity being key areas of concern. Future electric aircraft will rely on multiple energy sources. Batteries can provide a fast response to changes in power demands, and fuel cells offer high energy density for prolonged operation. This work has developed an energy management strategy (EMS) aimed to minimise the overall energy consumption from these sources. The EMS is further designed to respect the operational limits of each component. It investigates three EM approaches to account for the hydrogen consumption restriction, namely the unconstrained method, the fixed-limit method, and a novel depletion-aware method. The unconstrained method assumes there is an unlimited amount of hydrogen, meaning it uses 14.81% more hydrogen than is available, whereas the fixed-limit approach applies the maximum amount of hydrogen available within the fuel tank. However, when there is no hydrogen available, the fuel cell shuts down immediately. This work introduces a novel depletion-aware approach which is conscious of reaching the hydrogen supply minimum limit and, hence, allows for greater use of the battery energy during this period. This allows for better coordination between the battery and fuel cell. The three EMSs are simulated and verified in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The simulation results are then validated using software-in-the-loop in dSPACE. The work demonstrates that the depletion-aware approach has distinct benefits compared to the other two methods as it constrains the fuel consumption and allows a smoother transition between energy storage devices and provides a scalable energy management strategy applicable to a range of all-electric and hybrid-electric aircraft.