Fuel cells are considered as one of the most promising methods to produce electrical energy due to its high-efficiency level that reaches up to 50%, as well as high reliability with no polluting effects. However, scientists and researchers are interested more in proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). Thus, it has been considered as an ideal solution to many engineering applications. The main aim of this work is to keep the PEMFC operating at an adequate power point. To this end, conventional first-order sliding mode control (SMC) is used. However, the chattering phenomenon, which is caused by the SMC leads to a low control accuracy and heat loss in the energy circuits. In order to overcome these drawbacks, quasi-continuous high order sliding mode control (QC-HOSM) is proposed so as to improve the power quality and performance. The control stability is proven via the Lyapunov theory. The closed-loop system consists of a PEM fuel cell, a step-up converter, a DSPACE DS1104, SMC and QC-HOSM algorithms and a variable load resistance. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme, experimental results are compared with the conventional SMC. The obtained results show that a chattering reduction of 84% could be achieved using the proposed method.

Polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells demonstrate potential as a comprehensive and general alternative to fossil fuel. They are also considered to be the energy source of the twenty-first century. However, fuel cell systems have non-linear output characteristics because of their input variations, which causes a significant loss in the overall system output. Thus, aiming to optimize their outputs, fuel cells are usually coupled with a controlled electronic actuator (DC-DC boost converter) that offers highly regulated output voltage. High-order sliding mode (HOSM) control has been effectively used for power electronic converters due to its high tracking accuracy, design simplicity, and robustness. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method based on a combination of reference current estimator (RCE) and high-order prescribed convergence law (HO-PCL) for a PEM fuel cell power system. The proposed MPPT method is implemented practically on a hardware 360W FC-42/HLC evaluation kit. The obtained experimental results demonstrate the success of the proposed method in extracting the maximum power from the fuel cell with high tracking performance.

Piezoelectric actuators (PEA) are devices that are used for nano- microdisplacement due to their high precision, but one of the major issues is the non-linearity phenomena caused by the hysteresis effect, which diminishes the positioning performance. This study presents a novel control structure in order to reduce the hysteresis effect and increase the PEA performance by using a fuzzy logic control (FLC) combined with a Hammerstein–Wiener (HW) black-box mapping as a feedforward (FF) compensation. In this research, a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) was contrasted with an FLC. From this comparison, the most accurate was taken and tested with a complex structure with HW-FF to verify the accuracy with the increment of complexity. All of the structures were implemented in a dSpace platform to control a commercial Thorlabs PEA. The tests have shown that an FLC combined with HW was the most accurate, since the FF compensate the hysteresis and the FLC reduced the errors; the integral of the absolute error (IAE), the root-mean-square error (RMSE), and relative root-mean-square-error (RRMSE) for this case were reduced by several magnitude orders when compared to the feedback structures. As a conclusion, a complex structure with a novel combination of FLC and HW-FF provided an increment in the accuracy for a high-precision PEA.

This paper presents a comparison of optimizers for tuning a fractional-order proportional-integral-derivative (FOPID) and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers, which were applied to a DC/DC boost converter. Grey wolf optimizer (GWO) and extended grey wolf optimizer (EGWO) have been chosen to achieve suitable parameters. This strategy aims to improve and optimize a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) output power quality through its link with the boost converter. The model and controllers have been implemented in a MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. This study has been conducted to compare the effectiveness of the proposed controllers in the transient, accuracy in tracking the reference current, steady-state, dynamic responses, overshoots, and response time. Results showed that the combination EGWO-FOPID had significant advantages over the rest of the optimized controllers.