Kenan Baltaci

NI LabView data acquisition system design using hydrogen fuel cell

Fuel cell stacks containing hundreds of individual cells are capable of generating high voltage and current values needed for transportation, commercial, residential, portable and industrial power applications. Although majority of hydrogen produced today comes from reformulated natural gas generated through a process that creates a significant amount of carbon dioxide, fuel cell is still a viable energy source for the future electrical power applications. One of the hard cases of the fuel-cell power systems is proper monitoring, instrumentation and data acquisition of system parameters such as fuel flow into the system, AC and DC voltage values, load current, humidity, power, pressure, temperature, fuel utilization, overall system efficiency, noise, etc. Fuel cell test systems must precisely monitor and control the aforementioned hundreds of measurements in real-time. It is necessary to have an instrumentation system which is able to monitor and control fuel cell operation under varying conditions and accurately get information relating to real-time performance and operational characteristics to calculate fuel cell efficiency correctly. Instrumentation and interface systems must also provide flexible data acquisition, monitoring, and control capability to precisely control fuel cell operation. Therefore, a typical fuel cell test system requires high-resolution, highvoltage input, isolation, and waveform acquisition capability. The objective of this applied research project is design and implementation of a high-resolution data acquisition and interface module for a 500 W Hydrogen fuel cell power station using LabVIEW™ PDS v8.20 software and field point based data acquisition modules.