Surge control of the electrically driven centrifugal compressor

This paper presents a method of the energy efficiency and the operational performance improvement of the electrically driven air compression system. The key innovation of the proposed method-the active surge suppression of the centrifugal compressor by means of the speed control of the electrical drive has been experimentally validated. This method allows the load following operation of the compression system keeping the fast response on the application demands. The described control approach is considered to be applied to the "balance-of-plant" of a fuel cell (FC) power system.