A Hybrid Fuel Cell Power System

This paper proposes a hybrid fuel cell power system, which consists of a fuel cell, an isolated unidirectional converter, a bidirectional converter, an inverter, and a battery. The fuel cell and the battery are connected to the same voltage bus through an appropriate hybrid full-bridge LLC resonant unidirectional converter and a three-level buck/boost bidirectional converter, respectively. The battery is an auxiliary energy source, powers the load during the system´s start state to make it easy for the system to cold start, and provides or absorbs the dynamic power when the load varies and the fuel cell cannot respond immediately, so the system dynamic characteristics are improved. Furthermore, the battery can also provide peak power at overload, so the power rating of the fuel cell can be decreased, which reduces the total system cost. In order to ensure that the system operates with high efficiency, this paper also proposes a power management control scheme, which controls the bidirectional converter operating under buck, boost, or shutdown mode according to the operation condition of the fuel cell and battery, so that the battery can be charged or discharged. The operation of the system during cold start and overload are analyzed in detail. A 1-kW fuel cell power system was built in the laboratory. Experimental results are shown to verify the theoretical analysis.