This paper presents the development of an energy management system (EMS) for the application of a fuel cell-battery hybrid power system in a Lift-Cruise type unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). When a fuel cell is used as the primary power source for a Lif...
This paper presents the development of an energy management system (EMS) for the application of a fuel cell-battery hybrid power system in a Lift-Cruise type unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). When a fuel cell is used as the primary power source for a Lift-Cruise UAV, a secondary energy storage system is employed in parallel to enhance the system’s responsiveness to rapid load variations during different flight phases. However, such a hybrid configuration requires an efficient energy management strategy to achieve optimal power distribution among multiple power sources. For redundancy and scalability of the power capacity, a multi-stack fuel cell system was adopted, which necessitated the development of a converter tailored to the operating characteristics of the hydrogen fuel cell stacks.
In this study, a fuel-cell DC-DC converter (FDC) integrated with an energy management unit (EMU) was designed and controlled for the hybrid power system composed of multi-stack fuel cells and a battery. To accommodate the multi-stack configuration, the FDC was designed with a dual-input single-output structure, and a single-voltage dual-current control algorithm was implemented to achieve balanced load sharing among stacks. To address the transient characteristics of fuel cell outputs under current pulse (CP) operation, an Input Idle Period (IIP) compensator was applied, enabling the converter to adapt to the unique dynamic behavior of the aerial fuel cell system. Moreover, a power distribution algorithm was embedded to allocate power channels based on flight modes, thereby enabling integrated energy management of the hybrid system. The proposed FDC algorithm was validated through simulation and further examined via an iron-bird ground integration test to verify its applicability to an actual UAV hybrid power.