Fuel cell emulator based on interleaved synchronous buck converter

This paper shows the design and implementation of a Fuel Cell (FC) system emulator through the Hardware-in-loop (HIL) technique. The proposed FC emulator is tested on a detailed nonlinear simulator taken from the open literature. The goal of this research is the setup of a test bench that allows developing and testing control strategies in a FC system as well as to dispose with a platform for developing new power conditioning converters for this kind of systems. The Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is the class of FC addressed in this research. The emulator is based on an interleaved buck converter in order to get a test bench with an output voltage of good quality.