A Hybrid Type DC-DC Converter with New Control Strategy for a Micro-Fuel Cell Power Supply System

Abstract

A micro-fuel cell power supply system realizes an electronic ubiquitous society. Especially, the micro-fuel cell power supply is promoted to apply mobile systems such as small personal computer, cellular phone and so forth. In this case, it is attracted strongly to employ both of the micro-fuel cell and battery as the hybrid power supply system. This paper proposes a hybrid type DC-DC converter with new control strategy for the micro-fuel cell power supply system, and provides the operation principle, the experimental result and so forth. The new hybrid type DC-DC converter has a new output power compensation and new optimum operating point tracker using the microcomputer. As a result, the new hybrid type DC-DC converter can operate stably against the variation of power from the micro-fuel cell and the variation of the load current.

Output power regulation system for portable micro fuel cell systems

“…Though similar concepts have been applied to vehicle hybrid power systems (Fu et al, 2019), controlling the fuel cell stack's output power is rarely introduced in micro-sized and low-voltage systems. Works in hybrid power systems combine electric power storage with fuel cell stacks, usually focusing on tracking the fuel cell's maximum power (Ramos et al, 2007;Karami et al, 2012) to fit the system's fuel flow (Matsuo et al, 2006) or maintain the fuel cell stack in a high-efficiency zone (Hsu et al, 2012). These works have achieved success in fuel cell power control, but recent works have usually focused on control algorithms, while few works have focused on actual system implementation.…”