Model-in-the-loop development and validation for a supervisory ECU in a hydrogen fuel cell multi-module heavy-duty truck

Transport sector accounts for nearly 28% of global energy demand and is one of the main contributors to CO2 emissions, making its decarbonization a critical challenge. Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles, particularly suited for heavy-duty applications due to their high energy density and efficiency, offer a promising way to reduce the sector's environmental impact. Modern heavy-duty vehicles increasingly adopt PEM multi-module architectures, where multiple modules operate in parallel to meet the required power demand, increasing efficiency, flexibility and redundancy as well as the complexity of the system. Each module operates as an indipendent subsystem with its own controller but a supervisory ECU is required to manage power distribution, thermal balance, fault detection and data exchange within the system. Given this complexity, validating the supervisory ECU software directly on hardware would be expensive and time consuming. For this reason, Model in the Loop (MiL) simulation is used, allowing the integration of control logic with detailed physical models of the FC system in a safe, virtual environment. MiL allows extensive testing under a wide range of operating conditions, ensuring early detection of bugs and result repeatability. This thesis presents the development, validation and standardization of a MiL environment for testing a supervisory ECU in a multi-module hydrogen fuel cell system for a heavy-duty truck, starting from describing the ECU functionalities, system layout, MiL architecture and test cases. Advanced test cases are designed and a comparison between MiL results and real-world data obtained with test bench simulations is done to fully validate the MiL environment. To conclude, a standard procedure to develop and analyze simulations will be defined as well as an automatized procedure to reduce time needed to perform MiLS. The results show an increase of efficiency and reduction of time together with a defined standard procedure to follow.