CPU-FPGA based real-time simulation of fuel cell electric vehicle

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has been considered as one of the promising renewable power technologies for the vehicular application. This paper proposes a fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) power system model that can be implemented in the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) emulation for real-time execution on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The FCEV model comprises three parts: a PEMFC, a Z-source inverter and a squirrel cage motor. To achieve an accurate and efficient FPGA resources’ utilization, the PEMFC model is implemented by CPU whereas the models of the DC-AC inverter and the electrical motor are built in FPGA. For the validation of the proposed power system, the real-time simulation tests are conducted with a high accuracy. The developed hybrid system model can reach a simulation time step of 100 ns for FPGA and 500 μs for CPU under the co-simulation mode. Moreover, the simulation under various system operating conditions indicates that the high performance can be reached by the hybrid system computed in real-time. The proposed real-time model can be used to design the on-line diagnostic and model predictive control method, which can help to test the FCEV before the commercial applications.