Optimal Sizing and Energy Management of a Battery to support a Fuel Cell Powered Regional Electric Aircraft During Take-Off

Kurzfassung

This paper presents a methodology for the sizing and energy management of a battery pack to supply a parasitic load in a Low Temperature Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (LT-PEM) Fuel Cell powered Regional Electric Aircraft during Take-Off. The method aims at obtaining the minimal battery size required to power the parasitic load. The parasitic load considered in this study is the thermal management system (TMS) of a power electronics inverter (PE). First, an optimal control problem is formulated, whose objective is to minimize the mass flow rates of the coolant liquid and air while satisfying the temperature constraints of the PE system. A Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm is used to compute the solution of the optimal control problem. Based on the minimum mass flow rates, the power consumption of the pump and the puller fan of the TMS is determined. Second, a battery sizing optimization and optimal power split computation is performed iteratively to obtain the optimal size of the battery pack that meets the power demand of the TMS while minimizing the power that the fuel-cell system (FCS) needs to supply and satisfying the battery pack constraints. The battery sizing optimization is solved using a non-linear least squares method and the optimal control problem for the power split between the battery pack and the FCS is solved using a DP algorithm.