Experimental results and comparison of two structures for a fuel cell-supercapacitor hybrid system

In this paper, implementation results of two different topologies for a fuel cell-supercapacitor (SC) hybrid system are presented. In first topology, the SC bank is connected to a low voltage DC-bus while in the second one, it is connected to a high voltage DC-bus through a DC-DC converter. The energy management is carried out in both the topologies with the same control method based on notion of the flatness. Performance of the hybrid systems is studied in different operating modes. Then, the losses are calculated in each topology where the different semiconductor switches are used in the DC-DC converters. These losses are then utilized to calculate the efficiency of each topology in different operating mode and the simulation results are presented to compare the results.