The impact of stack allocation on the performance of a hybrid multi-stack fuel cell system

Multi-stack fuel cell systems (MFCSs), composed of multiple low-power fuel cells operating independently, offer increased power range, reliability, space flexibility, and modularity, making them ideal for heavy-duty applications. The performance of MFCSs is influenced by both the number and combinations of stacks that are used to construct the system. This paper examines the impact of these factors on the operational costs of fuel cell systems (FCS), encompassing hydrogen consumption and stack degradation costs. Three case studies are investigated, and in each case, the best allocation scheme is introduced based on the value of the objective function. Sequential quadratic programming (SQP) is selected to perform energy management among power sources. Also, the results demonstrate that increasing the number of stacks from two to three resulted in a 6.33% reduction in operational costs, while further augmenting the number of stacks from three to four notably decreased expenses by approximately 14.87%.