J. J. Moré

Development and Implementation of a Supervisor Strategy and Sliding Mode Control Setup for Fuel-Cell-Based Hybrid Generation Systems

This paper presents the development and experimental results of a supervisor strategy and a sliding mode control setup to improve the performance of hybrid generation systems. The topology in this study is conformed by a core comprising a fuel cell module and a supercapacitor module, in combination with an alternative energy source module and an electrolyzer. In particular, a wind power turbine is considered as alternative power source to attain a hybrid generation system fully relying on renewable energy. First, a supervisor strategy is proposed to manage the power flows of the subsystems and coordinate the system as a whole. Subsequently, a sliding mode control setup for combined operation of the dc/dc power converters of the fuel cell/supercapacitor core is presented to track the power references synthesized by the supervisor control. Both control levels, supervisor strategy and sliding mode controllers, are implemented and assessed through extensive experimental tests under different wind conditions and heavy-load changes.

Multi input sliding mode control of an autonomous fuel cell-supercapacitor hybrid system

This paper presents the design of a sliding mode control strategy through an input decoupling of an hybrid fuel cell based system. The hybrid system is composed by a fuel cell stack and a Supercapacitors module, connected to a single DC bus. A continuous conduction mode MIMO model is considered and the control strategy for the system is discussed. The latter is developed using a diffeomorphism to decouple the control inputs to surface interactions. Finally, an adaptive switching function for the two inputs is designed to robustly reject system perturbations and parameters variations. The control strategy is then evaluated through extensive simulation, considering strong load demand variations.