Optimal energy control of a PV-fuel cell hybrid system

This paper deals with a real time implementation of a fuzzy logic-based power management of a small scale generation hybrid power system. The system consists of a photovoltaic array and a fuel cell stack, supported by a single-phase grid that supplies a stand-alone AC load. The proposed supervisory algorithm guaranties the system to switch smart between two operation modes, according to the load demand, the gas level and the PV availability. Obviously, the PV side DC-DC converter is controlled to track permanently the maximum power point by using a fuzzy logic MPPT method; whereas, the fuel cell stack and the grid converters are tuned to cover the remaining power, or alternatively, injecting the exceeding power to the utility. Besides, to feed the AC load with a pure sine wave, a Back stepping algorithm is proposed to control the front-end single-phase inverter. To test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, experimental results obtained with a given load profile are presented and commented.