A Novel Power Electronics-Based Fuel Cell Emulator

This paper proposes a prototype of a new power electronics-based fuel cell emulator. It can efiectively replace a real electrochemical fuel cell stack during the development stage of a fuel-cell based power generation. The power stage of this new fuel cell emulator consists of a current source converter (buck rectifler) and a dc-to-dc buck converter. The research mainly focuses on emulating the electrical behavior of two well-known fuel cell systems: Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) and Solid Oxide fuel cells. A 1.5kW PEM fuel cell case is presented in this paper. Analysis, modeling and control strategy are presented. A hybrid control technique and a new voltage-current curve tracking technique have been proposed. Both static and dynamic performances of the proposed fuel cell emulator are experimentally verifled. The results show that the proposed system can efiectively perform in all three operation regions, i.e. activation, ohmic and concentration. With the collaboration of the power electronics circuits and the DSP-based controller, the proposed fuel cell emulator provides both precisely emulated voltage-current characteristic and high-quality output voltage and current.