Controller Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation for Design of Power Management Strategies for Fuel Cell Vehicle with Energy Storage Yuhang Deng, Hui Li, Simon Foo Electrical and Computer Engineering Department FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, Tallahassee, FL 32310 yuhang@caps.fsu.edu Abstract— Designing digital control system for fuel cell vehicle (FCV) with energy storage (ES) power management strategy can be costly and time consuming. In this paper, Controller Hardware-In-the-Loop (CHIL) simulations are used to design power management strategies using Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) for a FCV system with ES. CHIL simulation is a rapid, low-cost prototyping and testing method for digital controller design for FCV. The idea is to replace the simulated control system with a real hardware controller, which interacts with the rest of the system that are simulated on the RTDS. In particular, two power management strategies were developed for the FCV system with ES. The FCV power train was modeled and simulated on RTDS in real time. The power management strategies were implemented using a hardware controller digital signal processor (DSP). The CHIL simulation waveforms were consistent with pure software simulation waveforms. The experiment results demonstrated that CHIL using RTDS provides a fast, safe and reliable method to design and test power management strategies for FCV with ES. Keywords- Controller Hardware-In-the-Loop; Fuel cell vehicle; Energy storage; Power management strategy I. INTRODUCTION Designing digital control system for fuel cell (FC) vehicle (FCV) with energy storage (ES) power management strategy can be costly and time consuming. For a nonlinear motor drive load in FCV system, sampling frequency and time delay are two key parameters of digital controller that can make the system unstable. Controller Hardware-In-the-Loop (CHIL) simulation is a rapid, low-cost prototyping and testing method for digital controller design for FCV. CHIL simulation replaces the simulated control system with a real hardware controller, which interacts with the rest of the system that are simulated on the simulator in real time. This method increases the realism of the simulation and provides access to the hardware features. Consequently, CHIL makes the testing of new control algorithms fast, safe and reliable [1-2]. CHIL needs the rest of system on the simulator to achieve real time capability. Currently, extensive research is being carried out in academia and industry in the development of real time simulation platforms [3-4]. In Ref. [3], separate PC computers through external communication link are used to transmit data. In Ref. [4], the simulation environment is composed of Virtual Test Bed (VTB) and its real time extension. But due to the restricted real time computational capabilities of these platforms, the complication of the simulated system is limited. In this paper, applying CHIL to design power management strategy using Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) for a FCV system with ES is proposed. Two power management strategies were developed for the FCV system with ES. The FCV power train was modeled and simulated on RTDS in real time. The power management strategies were implemented using a hardware controller digital signal processor (DSP). The CHIL simulation results were compared with those of the pure software simulated system. The experimental results demonstrated that CHIL using RTDS provides a fast, safe and reliable method to design and test power management strategies for FCV with ES. II. FCV POWER TRAIN CONFIGURATIONS AND POWER MANAGEMENT STRATEGY This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number ECCS-0641972. (a) (b) Fig.1 (a) FCV power train configuration I, (b) FCV power train configuration II. 978-1-4244-2601-0/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE 866