High power efficiency design of direct methanol fuel cell power generating systems

This paper presents a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control method for high efficient direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) generation systems via T-S fuzzy model. In detail, we consider a DC/DC boost converter and incremental resistance method to regulate the output power of the DMFC to increase the output power under various conditions. First, the nonlinear boost converter system is represented by the T-S fuzzy model based control. Then, a fuzzy MPPT controller is proposed to achieve the MPPT control, in which the controller gains are obtained by solving linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, the satisfactory performance is shown from the simulations even under varying fuel cell conditions.