Control and energy management of hybrid system based on a fuel cell/photovoltaic/super capacitor using an AC-link inverter connected to the grid

Abstract

<jats:p> This article deals with the power flow control in a hybrid power system, which is composed of a fuel cell, photovoltaic system and a super capacitor. The super capacitor has been employed with an aim to ameliorate the performance of the hybrid power system. In addition, it takes into account the energy fluctuations of photovoltaic energy sources and the slow dynamic of the fuel cell. Each source is connected to a DC/DC converter and their outputs are connected to a common DC-link and they supply a DC load. Furthermore, an energy management algorithm has been carried out in order to commonly share the power between the sources and the load. The proposed energy management method shows its flexibility, and an efficient energy conditioning between different sources is guaranteed in case of multi-source system. The main originality of this work lies in the use of AC-link partial resonant DC–AC converter topology to interface hybrid system and to inject the excess of energy to the grid. In this article, the system description, the control and the modeling of DC/DC converters and the AC-link converter are provided. Finally, simulations under Matlab/Simulink are shown in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy and the energy management algorithm. An implementation on real-time using dSpace 1104 is presented to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed control strategy. </jats:p>