A Frequency Separation Rule-based Power Management Strategy for a Hybrid Fuel Cell-Powered Drone

This paper deals with hybrid electric powered drones power management while targeting sources lifetime extension and power supply system efficiency improvement. In this context, a hybrid system topology based on fuel cell, battery, and supercapacitor, is adopted in order to combine different sources characteristics. A real power profile, extracted from experimental flight tests of a small hexacopter, is used to model the load requirement. For power management purposes, a frequency separation approach is combined with rule-based strategy to split the demand power between the three sources using DC/DC converters. The achieved simulation results clearly show that the proposed power management strategy enables extending the fuel cell and battery lifetimes inducing faster response and therefore improving the drone maneuverability.