A novel control scheme to improve the transient response of fuel cell

This paper deals with a new control scheme to regulate real and reactive power output from a grid connected fuel cell. The control philosophy is based on d-q transformation and subsequently generating a reference signal that is tracked by an IGBT based inverter. Since, the current output of a fuel cell is related to the availability of hydrogen in the stack, to protect it from hydrogen starvation, a battery is implemented to take care of the current transient. Moreover, as a battery should not supply power in steady state, the hydrogen input to the fuel cell is regulated, so that in steady state whole of the injected power is produced from the fuel cell. The dynamic modeling of the grid connected fuel cell, with coordinate control of hydrogen flow and DC/AC inverter to regulate both real and reactive power feed to the grid is carried out using MATLAB/SIMULINK platform. The simulation results show that the performance of the controllers is quite acceptable though there can be further improvement in dynamic response of the system.