Zero-Emission Marine Vessels: Multidomain Modeling and Real-Time Hardware-in-the-Loop Emulation on Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform: Zero-emission marine vessels: modeling and real-time emulation

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are becoming increasingly common in modern marine electric vessels, helping achieve the sustainable development objective of lowered emissions and zero-emission marine transportation. This article introduces a hierarchical hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) emulation scheme for the zero-emission marine vessel at the system level and device level. A comprehensive computational PEMFC model is presented in electrical, thermal, and fluid domains. Electromagnetic transient program models are utilized for batteries, power converters, and electric thrusters to describe their behavior and dynamic response and analyze the influence of system components on their performance. The real-time hardware emulation on the Xilinx Versal adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) provides the ability to simulate the complete system at microsecond-level time intervals, which is essential for validating the marine vessel’s dynamic behavior under various operating conditions. The results demonstrate that the multidomain PEMFC model effectively captures the complex electrical, fluid, and thermal behavior and the interaction with marine vessels. Additionally, the proposed hierarchical HIL emulation scheme is proven to be a valuable tool for the design and testing of zero-emission marine vessels, which enables comprehensive assessment and verification of vessel performance.