Control strategy of hybrid PV/ FC/ battery system for a Malaysian household application

Abstract

The negative impact of fossil fuels has increased the importance of renewable energy, however due to its intermittency, second energy such as fuel cell (FC) is required in many applications. This paper proposes a control strategy of a hybrid PV/ FC/ Battery system for a Malaysian household application by using a combination of PI and switching controllers. Solar radiation and temperature data are based on location in Johor Bahru, Malaysia and the simulation is done using MATLAB Simulink. In this study, the FC is designed as a backup system that operates only when there is no solar radiation and the state of charge (SOC) of the battery is lower than 30%. To evaluate the performance of the proposed control strategy, three different states of SOC have been studied: 30%, 45%, and 100%. In this analysis, the efficiency of the maximum power point tracking (MPPT), boost converter, and bidirectional converter is also being investigated. The result shows that the individual efficiencies of MPPT, PV boost, FC boost and bidirectional converters are 90.38%, 92.33%, 91.35%, and 94.35%, respectively. It can be concluded that the FC works well as a backup generator with overall system efficiency is 71.92%.