Experimental Study on Energy Management Strategy for Fuel Cell Hybrid Tramway

In this paper, a fuel cell/battery hybrid power scaled-system for a low floor light rail vehicle (LF-LRV) is built, which consists of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system, battery bank, DC/DC converters and energy management configuration. In order to avoid the transients and rapid changes of power demand, and achieve high efficiency without degrading the mechanism performance for an energy management system of hybrid tramway, an energy management strategy based on state machine method is proposed to coordinate multiple power sources. The proposed energy management strategy is evaluated with a scaled-down driving cycle of tramway from Turkey, and the results demonstrate the hybrid system capability to meet appropriate driving cycle.