Energy management design for a 5kW fuel cell distributed power system

The proton exchange membranes fuel cell is known as a slow dynamic response application because of the existing of mechanical device such as air pressure, temperature and the humidity controllers. The transit load current may shorten the operation life of the fuel cell. In this paper, an energy management module with super capacitor as the auxiliary energy storage device is introduced to create a safe operation condition for the fuel cell during load transition. The energy management module design is base on the experiment results of the dynamic response of the fuel cell alone. The system structure and the model of the energy management are introduced. The controller design based on this model is given. The design of the bi-DC/DC converter and the energy management arithmetic are introduced for the practical realization. Finally, the experiment results upon a 5 kW fuel cell distributed power system with energy management module are given to verify the theoretical analysis.