Cathode pressure modeling of the Buckeye Bullet II 500kW PEM fuel cell system

This dissertation details the development of a model that simulates the pressure dynamics of the cathode supply system for the Buckeye Bullet 2, the worlds fastest hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. Due to the extreme power levels of the BB2 system, and the unique use of heliox as the oxidant supply, it is shown that existing system level models for predicting the fuel cell pressure dynamics do not adequately capture the dynamics of the BB2 system. Several modeling attempts are evaluated, and eventually the most robust model is a model which is derived from a rational system decomposition of the cathode system. By separating the major losses of the cathode system into an upstream and downstream resistance, the performance of the model is significantly improved. It is shown that the rate at which water exits the cathode plays a significant role accurately capturing the pressure dynamics. With this in mind, a distributed parameter model is developed to provide estimates of how the rate of liquid water removal from cathode changes with time. The results of this model are validated through physical testing. The resulting model relies on five empirically tunable parameters to tune the model performance to match that of the system. The method of calibrating these parameters is outlined, and the resulting model developed with stationary test data is compared to data from the actual BB2 race data. Only a few parameters need to be recalibrated, which is due to physical system differences between the data from the stationary tests and the race data.