Research on Cooptimal Control Method of Fuel Cell Anode and Cathode Gas for Variable Altitude Reliability Enhancement

The development of hydrogen fuel cell (FC) commercial vehicles is crucial for advancing FC industrialization. However, the reliability limitations of FC systems under variable altitude conditions have hindered widespread use in plateau transportation. This study proposes a coordinated control method combining adaptive cathode surge suppression and optimized anode purging aimed at enhancing the reliability of the FC gas supply system under variable altitude conditions. A model-adaptive updating strategy is adopted to design a model predictive control (MPC) approach for cathode gas flow and pressure regulation, integrating a dual-layer surge discrimination mechanism to prevent surge in altitude-gradient air compressors under extreme conditions. For anode pressure and flow regulation, a super-twisting algorithm-based control method is implemented. An entropy-weighted TOPSIS framework is employed to optimize purge strategies within a multiindex evaluation system. Under the China Heavy-duty commercial vehicle test cycle (CHTC) condition, the maximum control errors for oxygen excess ratio (OER) and cathode pressure demonstrate 19.88% and 10.72% reductions, respectively, compared with sliding mode control (SMC). The absolute error of anode pressure at 4000 m altitude decreases by 4.21% per cycle relative to plain-area strategies. Finally, hardware-in-the-loop experiments validate the method’s feasibility.