Seminars Archive

A New High Power Efficient Electronic Converter For Fuel Cell Applications.

Abstract
Sustainable development requires a sustainable supply of clean and affordable energy resources that do not cause negative social impacts. The continuous drop in crude-oil production and the gradual increase in oil prices have emphasized the need for suitable alternatives to our oil-based economy. Clean and efficient technologies based on renewable energy sources must consider addressing this issue. In this context, the fuel cells can provide a clean energy for the future, as they produce electricity from hydrogen through an electrochemical process, which is virtually free of emissions and noise and only water and heat are the by-products. In addition, the fuel cells have several advantages such as; silent, high potential for cogeneration applications, adaptable to a wide range of power and applications. The design, development and implementation of a power generation systems based on fuel cells requires careful selection of both the fuel cell model and the power converter. Therefore, a semi-empirical model of the PEM fuel cell is proposed and a method to extract their parameters is a secondary but also important objective achieved. A new high power efficient converter is proposed to improve the performance and to optimize the hydrogen consumption. This converter follows a resonant approach that provides low component stresses, high frequency operation, soft-switching commutation, and operation under a wide range of input and output conditions. The control is divided in two parts, namely: i) the voltage controller, which is responsible for keeping constant the output voltage of the converter under loading variations and ii) the PEM controller, which is responsible for improving the performance by keeping the PEM fuel cell in its optimal operating point. The experimental setup composed by the set of PEM fuel cell and the converter is presented and the experimental results obtained are analysed in comparison to the simulation ones. The simulation results are obtained in MatLab/Simulink software. This research work provides an accurate and useful tool for future specialists on this type of energy conversion and in addition, the analysis of new loading conditions such as electrical vehicles and renewable energy sources such as solar energy can be entered as future research.