Power Electronics of a Real Time Emulator of PEM Fuel Cell Systems

Fuel Cells (FC) systems are characterized by high costs and complex auxiliary devices. For this reason, can be useful to have a FC Emulator (FCE) to replace a real FC system during the development of the power converter for the conditioning of the energy generated by the FC. The FCE must be able to reproduce the nonlinear output voltage-current (V-I) characteristic of the FC. The paper presents a 5 kW FCE power converter aimed to be driven by an optimized parametric model of a Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) FC. Both the FC parametric model and the converter control are implemented with a Real-Time prototyping system (RT-LAB)