Control of redundancy PEM fuel cells in UPS applications with improved performance and durability

To guarantee the reliable operation of 24 hours, improve the performance and durability of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stack, and prevent it from sudden failure in an uninterruptible power system (UPS) with hybrid backup redundancy PEMFCs, battery and supercapacitor (SC) power sources, this paper conducts research in smart power management and control strategy of two PEMFCs and UPS. Firstly, based on the analysis of the major degradation mechanisms of different components of PEMFC against the operation conditions, two PEMFCs are proposed and applied to the UPS system. The experimental results show that the proposed intelligent energy management and control strategy can effectively guarantee the power sources supplied to UPS, and automatically switch the power supply between two PEMFCs.