A fuel cell-battery hybrid power supply for portable applications

Today, academic and industrial research is addressed to fuel cell based hybrid power supply in many fields of applications including stationary, automotive and portable electronics. Increasing source runtime, speeding up the transient response while minimizing weight, volume and cost of the power supply system are key requirements of all applications. According to the particular application, the power management system is optimized for a specific feature. In this paper, a fuel cell-battery hybrid power supply for a Digital Camera is proposed, although the control algorithm can be efficiently applied to any portable device. Thanks to an innovative control on the input power, any fuel cell pre-warming phase is not required. The proposed hybrid power supply prevents flooding by controlling the instantaneous fuel cell current. As shown by simulations results, hybrid source performances are neither affected by the fuel cell transient response nor by the battery runtime.