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Developing a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in three years is not a trivial task for any group of engineers. It is even worse still when you consider the climate it will be subjected to in Canada. For four months of the year, our vehicle remains inside of a heated garage, away from the cold ice and snow. Actual vehicle data is collected during the eight warm months of the year to construct empirical models. Software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop methodologies were used to tune our vehicles using the models that were constructed using actual vehicle data. Without MATLAB and Simulink from The MathWorks, our winters would be a lot less productive. In this paper, you will find a brief overview of our vehicle's architecture as well as how model-based design was valuable to our design and inplementation of our vehicle.

A fuel cell hybrid powertrain design is implemented and optimized by the University of Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team for the ChallengeX competition. A comprehensive set of bench-top and in-vehicle validation results are used to generate accurate fuel cell vehicle models for SIL/HIL control strategy testing and tuning. The vehicle is brought to a “99% buy-off” level of production readiness, and a detailed crashworthiness analysis is performed. The vehicle performance is compared to Vehicle Technical Specifications (VTS).