Energy-thermal collaborative management considering powertrain thermal characteristics for fuel cell vehicles in low-temperature environment

In low-temperature environment, conventional energy management strategies (EMS) for fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) aim at minimizing energy consumption, while ignoring the coupling between the fuel cell temperature and its efficiency, as well as that between the fuel cell temperature and the preheating energy consumption of the integrated thermal management system (ITMS). As a result, it is difficult to achieve the optimal. To address this issue, this paper proposes an energy-thermal collaborative hierarchical control strategy (FCT_CETMS) considering the thermal characteristics of fuel cells, aiming to achieve the optimal energy consumption on the premise of not affecting the temperature comfort of passengers and the power sources. Specifically, an energy-thermal coupling optimization problem regarding energy consumption considering the thermal characteristics and temperature control has been established. Then, the problem is solved through the hierarchical strategy. In the upper layer, an energy-thermal collaborative dynamic programming (CETDP) is proposed to obtain the global reference. In the lower layer, an adaptive equivalent consumption minimization strategy (A-ECMS) based on the global SOC guidance and an adaptive active disturbance rejection strategy (A-ADRC) based on the global temperature guidance are put forward to solve the coupling problem. Finally, the proposed strategy is verified through simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) tests. The results show that compared with the traditional energy dynamic programming (EDP), the energy-thermal collaborative dynamic programming (CETDP) proposed improves the energy-saving limit by 9–13 %. Compared with the benchmark control strategy (BEN_IETMS), the FCT_CETMS proposed in this paper achieves an energy-saving rate of 10.7%–12.5 %, and it can be applied online.