On the impact of fuel cell system response on power electronics converter design

In order to design a high performance power converter for fuel-cell-systems, some considerations are necessary. One consideration should be the range of load variation on the fuel-cell-system output. This is because of two reasons. The first reason is the current dependency of the fuel-cell output voltage; this can be overcome by utilizing a regulated power converter. The second reason is mechanical stresses resulting from continuous high current ripples that can reduce the system life span. Solving this problem requires appropriate filtering and converter controller. Selection of an ultra-capacitor and design of a proper controller require a fuel-cell-system model that can adequately represents the significant characteristics of the system. Such a model is developed in this paper via a simple method without requiring fuel cell design parameters. To validate the model, SIMULINK and PSPICE simulation results were compared with the results from the hardware setup and satisfactory results were obtained. The proposed linear model can be utilized in control system design for a fuel-cell-system converter