Energy Management of a Multi-Source Power System

Abstract

This work focuses on energy management for a system operated by multiple energy sources which include batteries, super capacitors, a hydrogen fuel cell, and a photovoltaic cell. The overall objective is to minimize the power consumption from all sources needed to satisfy the system’s power demand by optimizing the switching between the different energy sources. A dynamic mathematical model representing the energy sources is developed taking into account the different constraints on the system, i.e., primarily the state-of-charge of the battery and the super capacitors. In addition to the model, a heuristic approach is developed and compared with the mathematical model. Both approaches were tested on a multi-energy source ground robot as a prototype. The novelty of this work is that the scheduling of an energy system consisting of four different types of sources is compared by performing analysis via dynamic programming, and a heuristic approach. The results generated using both methods are analyzed and compared to a standard mode of operation. The comparison validated that the proposed approaches minimize the average power consumption across all sources. The dynamic modeling approach performs well in terms of optimization and provided a superior switching sequence, while the heuristic approach offers the definite advantages in terms of ease of implementation and simple computation requirements. Additionally, the switching sequence provided by the dynamic approach was able to meet the power demand for all simulations performed and showed that the average power consumption across all sources is minimized.