Optimal design and analysis of hybrid photovoltaic-fuel cell power generation system for an advanced converter technologies

Abstract

Nowadays, the entire world is concentrated on alternative energy sources (AES) or renewable energy sources (RES) for developing the power in economical cost and the sources like tidal power, solar energy, geothermal energy, wind energy, biomass, fuel cells etc. Among all those sources solar energy and fuel cells are chosen for developing the hybrid power generation (HPG) system. The photovoltaic (PV) module is designed with an efficient maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique of neuro-fuzzy (NF) tracking controller is developed to extract the maximum power and fed to boost DC-DC converter. In the meanwhile, air breathe fuel cell (ABFC) is designed and fed to the high step-up DC-DC converter with lesser duty cycle. The main concentration of this paper is to design the efficient HPG system for a competitive multilevel inverter (MLI) topology with less device count is the merit of this topology which is called packed U cell (PUC). In addition, this paper describes the mathematical analysis, design and operation of PV module, neuro-fuzzy (NF) MPPT controller based boost converter, ABFC, high step-up converter and PUC inverter. The P-V, I-V characteristics of PV module and ABFC stack effects on hydrogen pressure changes and temperature is examined. And also, the performance of HPG based PV-FC fed MLI is sifted for different load conditions. The overall performance is checked in terms of total harmonic distortion (THD) for phase voltages (Vph) and phase currents (Iph) which are accomplished through FFT analysis for each load case. The whole simulations are carried out in MATLAB/Simulink environment.