A novel MPPT controller based PEMFC system for electric vehicle applications with interleaved SEPIC converter

Abstract

The Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFCs) are one of the most effective and optimistic renewable energy source and they are extensively used in automotive applications. In the past, many researchers focused on solving the issues of extracting maximum power from fuel cell, controlling the speed and reducing the torque ripple of Brushless DC (BLDC) motor for fuel cell based Electric Vehicle (EV) systems. However, it is challenging to fine-tuning the gain parameters in the existing works MPPT approach and extracting maximum amount of energy. Additionally, it has limitations like unregulated voltage, problems of large overshoot, slow tracking speed, output power fluctuation, computational complexity and intricate modeling. Thus, the proposed work aims to create a revolutionary methodology called Unified Firefly Ersatz Neural Network (UFENN) - Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT). The UFENN is a kind of optimization-based machine learning technique that was created for efficiently optimizing the parameters to extract the maximum energy from the fuel cells. Furthermore, in order to control the output voltage with the least amount of power loss, an Interleaved SEPIC converter is also used in this work. During performance analysis, an extensive simulation results have been taken for validating the results of the proposed scheme by using various evaluation indicators.