Development and research of energy management strategy to minimize hydrogen consumption of dual stack PEMFC system

The paper presents energy management systems (EMS) for multistack fuel cell (FC) systems that allow minimizing hydrogen consumption. The multistack EMS should distribute loads between FCs to ensure efficient operation of the system. However, the FC characteristics can change significantly during their operation, which will lead to a change in the optimal power distribution between FCs. The most common multistack EMS – equal distribution and daisy chain – are not able to effectively respond to these changes. The authors propose a real-time EMS for a dual stack polymer proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system to reduce hydrogen consumption. The EMS initial data are the current characteristics of the FC – the polarization curve and hydrogen consumption. A computer model is used to compare the effectiveness of the proposed EMS and classical ones for three configurations of 2 kW dual stack PEMFC system. Using the test daily load profile as an example, the hydrogen savings for the proposed EMS were 7,24% compared to the equal distribution strategy and 11,42% compared to the daisy chain strategy.

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