The modeling and control of fuel cell emulators

This paper proposes a prototype of fuel cell emulator used to replace a real fuel cell system during the development stage of a fuel-cell based energy source system. The power stage of this new fuel cell emulator consists of a current source converter (buck rectifier) and a dc-to-dc buck converter. With the collaboration of these two power electronics circuits and a DSPbased controller, the proposed fuel cell emulator provides both emulated V-I fuel cell characteristic and high-quality output voltage and current. This research mainly focuses on emulating the behavior of two well-known fuel cell systems: proton exchange membrane fuel cell and solid oxide fuel cells. The proposed fuel cell emulator can effectively perform in all three operation regions, i.e. activation, ohmic and concentration. Analysis, modeling and control strategy are presented. Finally, both static and dynamic performances of the proposed fuel cell emulator are experimentally verified.