Authors: Peng Li; Shengrong Zhuo; Yigeng Huangfu

Date: 18 July 2025

Published in: IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification

Abstract: Energy management strategy (EMS) is one of the key technologies for performance optimization of fuel cell unmanned aerial vehicles. However, the traditional EMS considers only energy consumption in optimizing the operating economy and ignores the cost caused by source degradation, which usually results in the poor operation economy regarding total operating cost in long-term operation. In addition, to achieve the global optimization goal, most of the current EMSs only can be applied offline. To address these issues, this paper first establishes a comprehensive system operating cost model, by accounting for fuel consumption, equivalent fuel consumption and power supply degradation. Then, it adopts the Pontryagin minimum principle to determine the optimal EMS. In particular, to realize the online optimization, the co-state variable of the proposed method is updated in real time according to the state-of-charge (SOC) of the battery. Finally, the hardware-in-the-loop platform is built to verify the effectiveness of the proposed EMS. The results show that the proposed strategy has approximate global optimization ability and compared with equivalent consumption minimization strategy, under the traditional and emergency flight conditions, it can reduce the system operating cost by 16.62% and 27.21%, respectively, and decrease the fuel cell operating stress by 16.29% and 36.45%, respectively. Besides, the proposed strategy can effectively maintain the battery SOC.

全文链接：https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11084981