Joint Optimization of Configuration Design and Energy Management Strategy for a Fuel Cell/Supercapacitor Rubber Tire Gantry Crane

A fuel cell (FC)/supercapacitor (SC) hybrid powertrain is proposed for rubber tire gantry (RTG) cranes, aiming to address their characteristics of high peak/low average power demand and huge potential energy recovery. Unlike conventional design methods that neglect the coupling effects of energy management strategies (EMSs), this paper adopts a joint optimization (JO) for the powertrain parameters’ design. Parameters are preliminarily sized based on routine container handling tasks, then refined via a dynamic programming (DP)-based EMS for secondary optimization to minimize the total crane operation costs that cover hydrogen consumption as well as FC degradation. Iterations of the optimization process continue until targets are met. The results indicate that the JO framework achieves dual energy-economic goals, exhibiting a 57.33% enhancement in fuel economy compared to diesel-powered cranes through port validation while concurrently decreasing the SC’s capacity redundancy by 12.7%. These findings aid FC/SC RTG crane configuration design in ports. Additionally, the theoretical optimal operation cost obtained by the DP-based EMS can be used as a benchmark for evaluating other EMSs.