| This thesis presents an innovative method for the modeling, control and integration of a portable hybrid solid oxide fuel cell system. The control and integration of the fuel cell system is important not only for its efficient operation, but also for issues related to safety and reliability. System modeling is needed in order to facilitate the controller design.;Mathematical models of the various components of the system are built in the matlab/simulink environment. Dynamic modeling of the fuel cell stack, catalytic partial oxidation (CPOX) reformer, heat exchanger, tail gas combustor and tail gas splitter of the balance of plant system is performed first. Followed by, modeling of the three input DC/DC converter and energy storage devices (battery and supercapacitor).;A two-level control approach, higher level and lower level, is adopted in this research. Each of the two major subsystems, balance of plant subsystem and power electronics subsystem, has its own local level controller (called lower level controller) that are designed such that they follow exactly the command reference from a higher level controller. The higher level controller is an intelligent controller that makes decisions about how the lower level or local controllers should perform based on the status of fuel cell, energy storage device and external load demand. Linear analysis has been done for the design and development of the local controllers as appropriate. For the higher level controller, a finite state machine model is developed and implemented using stateflow and fuzzy logic toolboxes of matlab. Simulations are carried out for the integrated system. The simulation results verify that the controllers are robust in performance during the transient condition when the energy storage devices supplement fuel cells. The temperature and flow rates of the fuel and air are controlled as desired. The output from the designed fuel cell system is a regulated DC voltage, which verifies the overall controller performance. |
