Near-Optimal Controls of a Fuel Cell Coupled with Reformer using Singular Perturbation methods

Abstract

A singularly perturbed model is proposed for a system comprised of a PEM Fuel Cell(PEM-FC) with Natural Gas Hydrogen Reformer (NG-HR). This eighteenth order system is decomposedinto slow and fast lower order subsystems using singular perturbation techniques that provides tools forseparation and order reduction. Then, three different types of controllers, namely an optimal full-order,a near-optimal composite controller based on the slow and the fast subsystems, and a near-optimalreduced-order controller based on the reduced-order model, are designed. The comparison of closedloopresponses of these three controllers shows that there are minimal degradations in the performanceof the composite and the reduced order controllers.