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Multi-Objective Health-Aware Energy Management of a PEMFC/Battery/Supercapacitor Hybrid Emergency Power System for More-Electric Aircraft

Professor Necip Sahinkaya1
1Kingston University, London, UK

Abstract

Hybrid proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC)-battery-supercapacitor structures have recently been viewed as viable sources of emergency and auxiliary power in all-electric planes since they exhibit high specific energy, fast transient response, and minimal reliance on traditional engine-powered subsystems. Current supervisory energy management approaches towards such systems mainly consider optimization for hydrogen savings or instantaneous efficiency. However, a hydrogen-alone dispatch may lead to higher battery current stress, faster PEMFC dynamic load transitions, increased supercapacitor ripple and larger deviations from steady-state values of the DC-bus voltage. In this paper, a multi-objective health-aware strategy for energy management of a hybrid emergency power system consisting of a PEMFC, a lithium-ion battery and a supercapacitor pack is proposed. The HA-MOSCA supervisory controller incorporates component-level health indices along with system-level efficiency and power quality objectives in the dispatch decision-making process. Hydrogen consumption rate, battery aging metric, fuel cell dynamic stress, supercapacitor stress and DC-bus voltage ripple are minimized concurrently considering power balance, states and operation constraints. A health-aware adaptive sine cosine optimization algorithm is used to solve the problem and obtain close-to-optimum power distribution at low supervisory computational cost. The research is based on an emergency power system architecture for an aircraft comprising a 40 Ah battery, 15.6 F supercapacitor pack, a PEMFC stack and a 270 V DC-bus. Simulation studies performed for comparison against PI control, equivalent consumption minimization strategy and hydrogen-alone sine cosine optimization demonstrate that the proposed strategy reduces battery aging index by 22.8%, fuel cell stress by 28.2%, supercapacitor stress by 21.9% and average DC-bus voltage deviation by 35.9% compared to the hydrogen-only solution, but causes just 1.98% hydrogen loss. When compared against conventional PI control, hydrogen consumption is decreased by 14.4% and average DC-bus voltage deviation is lowered by 56.9%. The findings show that a minor compromise in fuel optimization will yield significant returns in terms of increased reliability, improved electrical performance, and deployability of safety-sensitive auxiliary power units on board airplanes.

Keywords: more-electric aircraft; aircraft emergency power; proton exchange membrane fuel cell; hybrid energy storage; battery degradation; supercapacitor; energy management; health-aware optimization; DC-bus stability
Citation
Professor Necip Sahinkaya. Multi-Objective Health-Aware Energy Management of a PEMFC/Battery/Supercapacitor Hybrid Emergency Power System for More-Electric Aircraft[J], TK Techforum Journal (ThyssenKrupp Techforum), Volume 2021 (3). 31-49.

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Joseph Bentsman1
1Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
S. Sheyko1, O. Hrechanyi1, T. Vasilchenko1, A. Hrechana2
1Department of Metallurgical Equipment, Zaporizhzhia National University, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine
2Scientific Laboratory of the Latest Technologies, Educational and Scientific Production Center “Metalspetsproekt,” Zaporizhzhia National University, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine