Modeling and power management control of the photovoltaic and fuel cell/electrolyzer system for stand-alone applications

This paper presents a power management control of a stand-alone hybrid system consisting of PV panel, fuel cell (FC), electrolyzer and battery. In this system the photovoltaic (PV) panel is used as primary energy source and the FC-electrolyzer combination is used as a backup and a long-term storage system. A battery bank is used in the system for short-time backup to supply transient power. All the energy sources are attached to a common DC bus via power converters, which are controlled to achieve a proper energy management. The PV power converter is controlled by Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) control in order to extract the maximum available power from PV panel The PV system is controlled by Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithm to extract the maximum available power from PV panels. The mathematical models and characteristics of the major system components are presented. The control strategy of the system is described. The modelling and the simulation of the proposed system is performed under MATLAB/simulink.