No abstract

This paper presents the air breathing fuel cell (ABFC) power system and its investigation for industrial applications. The ABFC actual behaviour is realized through the development of an empirical model by considering activation polarisation, ohmic polarisation and mass transport effects. The developed stack model feeds the power conditioning unit of the proposed power system. This paper will throw light on the usage of GaN wide bandgap (WBG) material based power semiconductor devices (PSDs) that are used to build 5-level cascaded H- bridge multilevel inverter and a boost converter. This in turn enhances the energy efficiency of the entire FC power system. These WBG PSDs present the phenomenal properties such as high saturated drift velocity, wide bandgap and high critical breakdown field. This multilevel inverter is implemented for facilitating a quality AC output besides offering the voltage control. The investigation is carried out with the development of power conditioning unit hardware setup besides the fabricated FC module for the validation the developed ABFC model.