Hardware-in-Loop Validation of the Current Control Employed for a Fuel Cell-Supercapacitor DC System

The need for seamless inclusion and utilisation of clean energy for conventional energy applications are increasing on a day-to-day basis. This paper emphasizes the control design and hardware-in-loop implementation of the control for a low voltage DC system comprising of fuel and supercapacitor bank supplying an intermittent load. In order to facilitate controlled power flow among the system participants, DC-DC boost and bidirectional converters are interfaced to the fuel cell stack and supercapacitor bank. Current control strategy is employed to schedule and dispatch the interfacing converters in order to address the fuel starvation phenomenon associated with the fuel cell without compromising the unforeseen load requirements. Further, a special case of supercapacitor state-of-charge (SOC) protection is embedded into the dynamic control of the system to maximize the availability of supercapacitor. The performance of the dynamic control is validated for unforeseen R, R-L load variations using MATLAB modelling and analysis. In addition, Hardware Co-Simulation of the dynamic control is carried out on a Zynq ZC702 FPGA evaluation kit using MATLAB-Xilinx system generator (XSG) interface in order to evaluate the performance of the dynamic control in real-time.