DC Shipboard Microgrid Modeling for Fuel Cell Integration Study

The integration of fuel cell technology in shipboard is essential for real fuel and pollution reduction in the marine sector. This integration can be pushed in the adoption of a dc shipboard power system (SPS). One of the impediments to this integration is the necessity to couple fuel cells (FCs) and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) and control them with a proper power management system (PMS), in order to sustain high load variations due to electric propulsion. In the literature, all these aspects are dealt independently and mostly assuming ideal conditions. The proposed control strategies are derived from the droop and secondary frequency regulation of the ac power system. This paper starts with a brief description on the characteristics of dc SPS along with fuel cell and battery modeling. Subsequently, this paper describes the proposed control strategy. Finally, this paper shows the behavior and principle of the proposed integration and analyzes the performance on a real measurement test case of a ferry. This paper is concluded by identifying the future research for the development of a PMS control strategy for critical marine missions.