Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy for UAV Hybrid Energy System Under Fuel Cell Fault Conditions

Fuel cell-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as a promising solution for long-endurance and high-efficiency aerial missions. This paper presents a distributed hybrid energy system architecture for UAVs, featuring a multi-converter and multi-port converter configuration that integrates dual fuel cells and a lithium-ion battery. To enhance energy utilization and operational robustness, an Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (ECMS) is proposed, which enables real-time energy management through instantaneous optimization while accounting for single-source fault conditions. The proposed method is evaluated through both simulation and scaled-down physical experiments. Results demonstrate that the ECMS improves energy management efficiency by 4.42% compared to traditional power-tracking strategies and effectively maintains system performance under fuel cell failure scenarios.