Wireless power management of small scale distributed hydrogen harvesting system with full digital control

Hydrogen is an attractive energy carrier for future sustainable energy systems due to its high energy density, high transportability, and zero emissions. The hydrogen gas can be harvested from a wide selection of hydrogen enriched molecules with different amount of energy investment. In this paper, a small scale water electrolysis system with distributed source input is investigated; photovoltaic is selected as the main source while battery is chosen as the secondary source to provide power leveling. The identification of electrolyzer stack and power converter module is conducted firstly for system modeling; local controllers are designed in the following step to ensure system stability and fast tracking of reference command; on the basis of local control establishment, a wireless data-link based power management system is proposed, which is designed to provide two sub-realtime management modes: power balancing and power matching. The system prototype is implemented with full digital control, and two modes of management operations are tested and verified experimentally.