Increment-oriented online power distribution strategy for multi-stack proton exchange membrane fuel cell systems aimed at collaborative performance enhancement

The multi-stack fuel cell system based on proton exchange membrane fuel cell has gained increasing attraction in high-power transportation applications. However, the real-time coordinated optimization among multiple fuel cell systems still remains a promising problem. To achieve the online collaborative performance enhancement between fuel economy and durability for the parallel multi-stack architecture, an increment-oriented power distribution strategy is proposed in this paper. It is inspired by the quadratic polynomial formulation derived from the hydrogen consumption analysis of integrated fuel cell system. The quantitative correlation between the fuel economy and durability is obtained with analytical power increments. To improve the strategy applicability with fault tolerance, iterative high-order sliding-mode differentiation procedure is utilized in the initial condition determination. Besides, performance-dominated power limits are considered in the global switching sequence calculation. The effectiveness and practicability of the proposed strategy are verified by two designed scenario cases with one-cycle short-term and life-cycle long-term evaluations. Detailed simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can guarantee fault tolerance operation and collaborative performance enhancement for multi-stack fuel cell systems with minimum hydrogen consumption and maximum service life compared with other advanced strategies. • The hydrogen consumption characteristics for PEM fuel cell system is analyzed. • An increment-oriented power distribution strategy for MFCS is proposed. • Coupling between fuel economy and durability for MFCS is characterized. • Fault tolerance performance of the proposed strategy are investigated. • Collaborative performance between fuel economy and durability is improved.