Robust low frequency current ripple elimination algorithm for grid-connected fuel cell systems with power balancing technique

The low frequency current ripple in grid-connected fuel cell systems is generated from dc-ac inverter operation, which generates 60 Hz fundamental component, and gives harmful effects on fuel cell stack itself, such as making cathode surface responses slower, causing an increase of more than 10% in the fuel consumption, creating oxygen starvation, causing a reduction in the operating lifetime, and incurring a nuisance tripping such as overload situation. With these reasons, low frequency current ripple makes fuel cell system unstable and lifetime of fuel cell stack itself short. This paper presents a fast and robust control algorithm to eliminate low frequency current ripple in grid-connected fuel cell systems. Compared with the conventional methods, in the proposed control algorithm, dc link voltage controller is shifted from dc-dc converter to dc-ac inverter, resulting that dc-ac inverter handles dc link voltage control and output current control simultaneously with help of power balancing technique. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm can not only completely eliminate current ripple but also significantly reduce the overshoot or undershoot during transient states without any extra hardware. The validity of the proposed algorithm is verified by computer simulations and also by experiments with a 1 kW laboratory prototype.