Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
2 August 2007
1. INTRODUCTION
Currently, fuel cells (FCs) are acknowledged as one
of the most promising technologies to meet the fu-
ture power generation requirements. Since fuel cells
directly convert fuel and an oxidant into electricity
through an electrochemical process without pollution
(CO2), they can achieve operating efficiencies 50%
- nearly three times of the efficiency of conventional
internal combustion engines (ICE) [1].
Nonetheless, the important technical limitation of
a fuel cell system is a current (or power) slope of
fuel cell must be limited in order to prevent a fuel
starvation phenomenon [2].
In addition, for vehicle applications, the traction
drive demands high power in a short time (for ex-
ample, vehicle acceleration and deceleration), around
two times of average power during drive cycle [3]. For Fig.2: Power profile of fuel cell hybrid source.
these reasons, some kind of hybridization of fuel cell
with other energy storage devices such as batteries or
supercapacitors will be advantageous as depicted in
2. FUEL CELL/BATTERY HYBRID POWER
Figs. 1 and 2.
SOURCE
This paper presents method on how to function a
main source (fuel cell) and a storage device (battery 2. 1 Configuration of Hybrid Power Source
Fuel cell voltage vF C is highest when no current is
Manuscript received on February 1, 2007 ; revised on May 4,
2007. flowing and drops with increasing current because of
1 The author is with the Department of Teacher Training losses in the stack. At rated current IF CRated , vF C
in Electrical Engineering, King Mongkut’s Institute of Tech- drops to around half of the no-load voltage [4], [5]. On
nology North Bangkok, Email: phtt@kmitnb.ac.th, thoun-
thong@yahoo.com
the other hand, battery voltage curve, for example in
Control of Fuel Cell/Battery Hybrid Source for Electric Vehicle Applications 193
a lead-acid battery, is linear over most of its operating 2. 2 Fuel Cell Current Regulation
range, however, at the end-of-discharge, the voltage When a fuel cell system is operated, its fuel flows
decreases very rapidly toward to zero [6]-[9]. are controlled by a ”Fuel Cell Controller” (refer to
Many previous works with a battery bank as an Fig. 3) which receives a fuel cell current demand
energy storage device have operated by connecting (reference) iF CREF from the hybrid control algorithm
batteries directly to a DC bus (for example, a DC (automatic operation in this work). The fuel flows
bus voltage (battery voltage) of the Honda Hybrid must be adjusted to match the reactant delivery rate
Insight is 144 V [3]). For these reasons, the proposed to the usage rate. Then, the inner fuel cell current
configuration of fuel cell/battery hybrid source, as control loop is compulsory and the control algorithm
depicted in Fig. 3, is that the fuel cell is connected demands energy from the fuel cell to the DC bus by
to the DC bus by a boost converter and the battery generating iF CREF , refer to Fig. 3 [13], which is sent
bank is directly connected to the DC bus. to the ”Fuel Cell Controller” synchronously. For the
A classical boost converter is selected for a fuel cell fuel cell system considered here, the fuel cell current
converter studied here, as portrayed in Fig. 4 [10]. demand signal iF CREF is in a linear scale of 50 A/10
Note here that the switch S2 is a shutdown device to V.
prevent the fuel cell stack from short circuit in case of One can take advantage of safety and high dynam-
the accidental destruction of S1, or of faulty operation ics of this loop as well; thus, it must be realized by
of the regulator [11]. analogical circuits to function at high bandwidth.
The fuel cell converter is driven, through MOS-
FET S1 gate signal, by means of a pulse width mod- 2. 3 Proposed Control Algorithm
ulation (PWM) for average current control in contin- To manage energy exchanges between the DC bus,
uous conduction mode, in order to obtain a constant the main source and the storage device, one may de-
switching frequency of 25 kHz for the fuel cell current. fine three operating modes (or states) [13], refer to
The used PWM generator is a high-speed PWM gen- Fig. 2:
erator UC28025B (Texas Instruments Inc.). More- • charge mode, in which the main source sup-
over, an analogical Proportional-Integral-Derivative plies energy to the storage device and/or to the load
controller (PID-controller) is chosen for the fuel cell (t2 to t4 ),
current controller as shown in Fig. 3 [12]. • discharge mode, in which both main source
and storage device supply energy to the load (t1 to
t2 ),
• recovery mode, in which the load supplies en-
ergy to the storage device (t4 to t5 ).
The proposed control scheme is that one takes ad-
vantage of a battery bank, which is directly connected
to the DC bus for supplying transient energy demand
and peak loads required during motor acceleration
and deceleration, as if this device is a standard source.
Besides, the fuel cell as a slow dynamic device func-
tions to supply energy to a battery bank to keep them
Fig.4: Fuel cell power conditioning (Converter cir-
charged.
cuit) [10].
The control strategy is a cascade control structure
composed of three loops. The outer loop is a bat-
194 ECTI TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRICAL ENG., ELECTRONICS, AND COMMUNICATIONS VOL.5, NO.2 August 2007
tery state-of-charge (SOC) control loop composed of To avoid over-voltage at the DC bus in case of an
SOCREF as a reference of SOC and iBatREF as a erroneous SOC estimation, vBus must be monitored
control variable output demanding a battery charg- to limit charging current. The battery current limita-
ing current. The middle loop is the battery current tion function consists of limiting iBatREF versus vBus
control composed of iBatREF as a battery current ref- as [13],
erence coming from the outer loop and iF CREF as a
control variable output demanding a fuel cell current. µ ¶
VBusM ax −vBus (t)
The inner loop is the fuel cell current control loop as iBatREF (t) = iBatChar (t)×min 1,
already explained in the previous section. ∆VBus
(3)
2.3...1 Control Loop of Battery State-of-Charge and where VBusM ax is the defined maximum DC bus
Current voltage and ∆VBus is the defined voltage band.
The well-known SOC estimation is defined as [14],
Z t
1
SOC(t) = SOCo + iBat (τ )dτ (1)
QBat to
3. EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION
Fig.8: Battery bank: 7.78 Ah , 12 V connected in
3. 1 Test Bench Description 4-series (total 48 V).
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1996 and 2001, respectively, and the
21-25, 2005.
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