Investigating the performance of a fuel cell based distributed generation system

This paper presents the design and simulation study of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell based distributed generation system. The topology chosen for the simulation consists of fuel cell power plant model, pulse width-modulation DC/DC boost converter and sinusoidal pulse width-modulation two-level inverter followed by an LC filter. Advanced control strategy is used for the overall system; its main objective is to regulate the output voltage from the DC/DC converter and to adjust the output voltage from the DC/AC inverter at different loading conditions. Simulation analysis was done using MATLAB/SIMULINK platform. Simulation results are given to show the overall system performance under heavy loading conditions, sudden increase in load and under unbalanced loading condition.