A Study of Battery Charging Time for Efficient Operation of Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle

† ABSTRACT Recently, the research focused on fuel cell hybrid vehicles (FCHVs) is becoming an attractive solution due to environmental pollution generated by fossil fuel vehicles. The proper energy control strategy will result in extending the fuel cell lifetime, increasing of energy efficiency and an improvement of vehicle performance. 1) Battery state of charge (SoC) is an important quantity and the estimation of the SoC is also the basis of the energy control strategy for hybrid electric vehicles. Estimating the battery's SoC is complicated by the fact that the SoC depends on many factors such as temperature, battery capacitance and internal resistance 2) . In this paper, battery charging time estimated by SoC is studied by using the speed response and current response. Hybrid system is consist of a fuel cell unit and a battery in series connection. For experiment, speed response of vehicle and current response of battery were determined under different state of charge. As the results, the optimal battery charging time can be estimated. Current response time was faster than RPM response time at low speed and vice versa at high speed.