Modeling and Simulation of an Aerodrome Electrical Power Source Based on Fuel Cells

The current challenge in aviation is to reduce environmental impact by reducing fuel consumption and emissions released, especially NOx. An open research direction, used to achieve these goals, is to develop new power sources based on unpolluting fuel, a solution being constituted by the use of H2 fuel cells. The article presents the modeling and simulation of a possible configuration for a hybrid aerodrome power source based on the fuel cell. The proposed architecture is composed of fuel cell stack, DC to DC boost converter, supercapacitor and buck-boost converter. The supercapacitor is connected to a buck-boost converter and the fuel cell is connected to a boost converter. The DC bus voltage is equal to 28.5 V. The proposed configuration is simulated in Matlab/ Simulink/ Simscape Power Systems. The main purpose of these simulations is to verify the simulation scheme behavior in order to use it in future detailed studies.