Robust Combined Control of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Equipped by Boost Converter

The fuel cell, especially its PEM type, is one of the most important sources of renewable energy, and considering the importance of energy in today's life, this paper presents a new solution to increase and optimize the output power of the PEM fuel cell. To extract the maximum power, the structure of PEM fuel cell equipped with boost converter is considered and this study presents the following innovations in this regard. To overcome the non-minimum phase and destabilizing nature of the boost converter, a hybrid robust control scheme is designed for the boost converter located at the output of the fuel cell stack. Two reset and adaptive sliding mode techniques in an innovative and hybrid design form the foundations of the planned scheme. Despite its simplicity, the reset technique has a high ability to eliminate the steady-state error, improve the transient and permanent dynamic response, and of course overcome the limitations of linear controllers. The planned sliding mode control technique is also an adaptive super twisting type, which is used to ensure the robustness and reliable performance of the controller against uncertainties and disturbances. The planned control scheme increases the power extracted from the PEM fuel cell by improving the performance of the boost converter and provides more efficiency than other techniques by stabilizing the output voltage from the PEM fuel cell and stack as well as ensuring stability. The outcomes of the implementation in the MATLAB environment and evaluation with the PI adaptive sliding mode method guarantee the efficiency and capability of the scheduled robust design.

Keywords:

PEM Fuel Cell , Boost converter , reset robust control , adaptive super twisting sliding mode control , Renewable Energy