MPPT of a PEMFC based on air supply control of the motocompressor group

In this paper, advanced control of the motocompressor group for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is addressed The response of a fuel cell (FC) system depends greatly on the air and hydrogen flow and pressure regulations and heat and water management This paper proposes to compute the optimal value for the oxygen stoichiometry reference in order to maximize at each computing time the output FC power This paper is a first if modest attempt to use the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) technique to a system based on a PEMFC associated to an air motocompressor The proposed technique is independent from the chosen PEMFC and motocompressor control technique It is shown that the MPPT applied in this paper allows increasing the output PEMFC power by over 10% If the output PEMFC power is fixed and imposed by the load this technique allows reducing the consumption of hydrogen Simulation results are presented and show the benefit obtained by applying the proposed technique (C) 2010 Professor T Nejat Veziroglu Published by Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved