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The objective of this paper is to help students optimize project component selection or design by detailing, through two specific examples, the University of Waterloo's Alternative Fuels Team's (UWAFT's) successful design process. UWAFT successfully designed a fuel cell powered vehicle for the ChallengeX student engineering competition. The use of a formal, structured design process enabled this team to achieve great confidence in both the feasibility of their design and their ability to manifest the design. This design process is model-based whereby a parameterized software model is created. This paper hopefully assists students to overcome a common reluctance to implementing a model-based design process. After a component is constructed and tested, students can update their software model, which can help them assess the strength of their design.

A fuel cell-battery hybrid powertrain SUV vehicle is designed using an optimized model-based design process. Powertrain and fuel storage components selected include a 65 kW Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) power module, two 67 kW electric traction motors, a 35 MPa compressed hydrogen storage tank, a 70 kW nickel metal hydride battery pack, and a University of Waterloo in-house DC/DC converter design. Hardware control uses two controllers, a main supervisory controller and a subsystem controller in addition to any embedded component control modules. Two key innovations of this work include the hybrid control strategy and the DC/DC converter. The final powertrain characteristics are expected to meet a set of Vehicle Technical Specifications (VTS).