Study of Operation Strategy for Hybrid PEM Fuel Cell and Supercapacitor

PEMFC has several technical problems such as water management, long term stability and performance degradation as. PEMFC has been studied not only to solve water management, but also to generate power in stable manner to system by using a hybrid system with auxiliary energy storage device. The purpose of this study is to couple PEMFC with supercapacitor to make a hybrid system and to design and test control strategies for stable power generation in case of changing output power. The polarization curve and dynamic behaviors while changing power were investigated to find out characteristics of PEMFC stack. A DC/DC converter was fabricated in order to increase fuel cell and supercapacitor voltage and to charge supercapacitor. We found that the operation strategy 2 was recommended to the system because of solving water management problem and increasing the dynamic behavior.