A Fuzzy Adaptive PID Controller Design for Fuel Cell Power Plant

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are promising electrochemical devices which translate chemical energy directly into electric energy with high efficiency and low pollution. However, the control of the output voltage of SOFCs is quite challenging because of the strong nonlinearity, limited fuel flow, and rapid variation of the load disturbance. Nowadays, proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are commonly utilized in industrial control systems for their high reliability and simplicity. However, it will lead to overshoot and windup issues when used in the wide-range operation of SOFCs. This paper aims to improve the PID controller performance based on fuzzy logic by (1) identifying a linear model based on the least squares method; (2) optimizing the PID parameters based on the generated linear model; and (3) designing a fuzzy adaptive PID controller based on the optimized parameters. The simulation results of the conventional PID controller and the fuzzy adaptive PID controller are compared, demonstrating that the proposed controller can achieve satisfactory control performance for SOFCs in terms of anti-windup, overshoot reduction, and tracking acceleration. The main contribution of this paper can be summarized as: (1) this paper identifies the SOFC model and uses the identified model as a control object to optimize conventional PID controllers; (2) this paper combines a fuzzy logic control scheme and PID control scheme to design our proposed fuzzy adaptive PID controller; and (3) this paper develops an anti-windup structure based on a back-calculation method to reduce saturation time and overshoot.

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