Operation, control and monitoring of PEM fuel cell system - part II

• Main Author: Lim, Zhen Yu.
• Other Authors: Gooi Hoay Beng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Electric power
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/40650
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In recent years renewable energy has been a popular solution in response to environmental issues as well as to the high and wildly fluctuating prices for oil and natural gas, due to the very much improvement the performance and affordability of the renewable energy today. Fuel cells, a type of renewable energy technologies, generate DC electricity with very little pollution: the byproduct from a hydrogen fuel cell is water. But the DC electricity generated by a fuel cell is typically not directly usable for the load due to variable DC voltage output; therefore electric power conditioning is typically required. Conventionally power converters such as DC-DC converter and inverter are used to condition the fuel cell output but recent years researchers have come up with a better inverter which consist of both the DC-DC converter and inverter in one set up and that is the Z-Source inverter and an improvement type of the Z – Source Inverter called the Quasi Z-Source inverter would be used in this project. Implementation of the controller called P+ resonant controller based on the internal model theory and close loop theory will also be done to keep the output of the inverter at a fixed value despite of the variable fuel cell output and also to align the inverter’s output frequency and phase angle to be the same as the utility’s output for synchronizing process. After which another controller which is the external real and reactive power control loop will also be implemented to facilitate the synchronizing process. Communication with power management software or PMS will also be established through Modbus Protocol using Labview as the platform. This PMS is to allow users to monitor and control the system on remote mode.