Control of stand alone solid oxide fuel cell using fuzzy logic

Distributed generation is expected to play a major role in future power generation systems. The ever-increasing need for electrical power generation and rapid progress in power deregulation and the environmental concerns have attracted much attention towards fuel cell power generation. The fuel cells are modular, efficient and have a lower environmental impact. The fuel cell output voltage at the series of stacks is uncontrolled DC voltage that fluctuates with load variations. It is converted to a controlled DC voltage by a control scheme that adjusts the duty ratio of the converter and also protects the fuel cell against sudden load variations and current reversal. Here we use a solid oxide fuel cell as it can act, as a small-scale stand-alone power plant because of the high voltage output it provides. A fuzzy logic based controller is designed for this purposes because of the numerous advantages it has over the other types of controllers. The most important aspect being, the cost of the controller design and implementation. The fuzzy control also has a high performance/cost ratio.