Design and implementation of an energy efficient power conditioner for fuel cell generation system

The energy use of the world grows continuously and the development of a clean distributed power generation becomes environmentally important. Fuel cells are one such integral part of Renewable Energy Sources based clean energy supply; that they operate with hydrogen as fuel and water with heat as process waste. Due to the electrochemical reaction, fuel cell has the power quality of delivering low voltage with high current capability. Here an attempt is made to develop a power conditioner with a series of conversion to get a 220 V sinusoidal AC, 50 Hz single phase voltage of low distortion and fast dynamic regulation to cater load variations. A novel Polyphase Boost DC-to-DC switching converter based on parallel connection of 8 identical converters with current mode control is devised to have minimum reflected ripple current and voltage injected to fuel cell input. A full bridge converter with high frequency transformer isolation, step-up the DC voltage level from the low voltage fuel cell along with poly phase boost converter, deliver required DC to the PWM inverter, which generate AC utility power output. Recent trend of Ultra-capacitor based transient energy storage and retrieval system, to cater for the sluggish behavior of fuel cell, for load transients is incorporated. DSP and FPGA based digital real time controllers are used to realize the gating of MOSFETs and IGBTs used in the power conditioner. A 1 kW power conditioner is developed for a PAFC fuel cell system with 12 V DC nominal and their performance evaluations are satisfactory. Copyright (C) 2011, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.