Supervised Bidirectional DC/DC Converter for Intelligent Fuel Cell Vehicles Energy Management

A novel technique for supervisory control of a bidirectional DC/DC converter is here considered and discussed. The converter is modeled as an hybrid system, where the plant represents the controlled converter and the supervisor is an event-driven DES described by a finite-state automaton. The supervisory control is used for appropriate controller selection in order to implement a power quality assessment strategy based on the dynamic selection of step-down and step-up modes, depending on controlled variables actual values. Both low-level regulators and supervisory controller will be derived adopting a rigorous mathematical approach. Finally, results in Saber will demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, considering as a testbench the implementation of an intelligent strategy for on-line mode inversion, i.e. from step-up to step-down operation and reverse, in order to fulfill to power quality requirements.