Hybrid power electronics architecture to implement the fuel cell management system

A power electronics architecture is proposed in this paper to manage the power of the fuel cell groups. This structure can separately manage the cells inside a stack or can manage different stacks of a multi-stack system and can deal with the electrochemical instabilities of cells. To realize this structure, the different cell groups are connected to boost converters separately. The output capacitor of each boost converter is connected in series. Due to the possibility of the power mismatch between cells, an equalizer is used to ensure the controllability of each boost converter. To control the output voltage, a supercapacitor bank is connected to the DC bus through a bidirectional converter. Based on a proposed dynamical reduced average model, the stability of the system is analyzed in this paper. The validity of the proposed model is verified by simulation and experimental results. Finally, the suggested power electronics architecture is experimentally assessed in the drying condition of the first group of cells.