Control of DC-DC Boost Converter Based on Optimal Gas Supply Characteristics of Fuel Cell System

The potential electrochemical and thermos-dynamic processes of fuel cell (FC) systems lead to a slow response, which is often combined with direct current-direct current (DC-DC) boost converters (DBC) to ensure the stability of the output voltage when the load changes. This paper aims to coordinate the dynamic characteristics between the FC system and the DBC, a DBC control considering the optimal gas response characteristics of the FC system is proposed. The variable load experiment of the FC and DBC system is carried out to verify the validity of the gas-electric coupling model, and the dynamic process of the stack voltage is obtained under different loads and operating parameters by the model. The voltage undershoots and net power are analyzed to determine the optimal operating parameters under the different step currents. Combined with the pre-supply gas scheme, the optimal response law of the FC system is feedforward to the DBC control. Under the same power demand, the proposed strategy’s voltage undershoots, and power slope is reduced and improved by 3.4% and 15.3% compared to ignoring the gas response and not considering the gas pre-supply pattern. A hardware-in-loop experiment is conducted to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed strategy.