A power management strategy for a stand-alone photovoltaic/fuel cell energy system for a 1kW application

In this paper a power management strategy is presented for a stand-alone photovoltaic (PV)/fuel cell (FC) energy system. PV is the primary power source of the system and an FC-electrolyzer combination is used as a backup and a long-term storage system. The energy in the hybrid system is balanced by the common dc bus voltage regulation. A simple hysteresis voltage control is used for dc bus voltage regulation. In this way, the fuel cell and the electrolyzer can be protected from unnecessary utilization or irregular operation (reduction of frequent start-ups and shutdowns). Simulation results obtained using Matlab and Simulink are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm