A New Method to Manage the Fuel Cell Initialization

This paper presents a new methodology to manage the initialization process of fuel cells (FCs) as a main source in a microgrid. The startup aims to reduce the warming-up time, increase the FC efficiency, and decrease the time response. As a solution, the use of storage systems combined with an adaptive gain scheduling to absorb the power transients improve the microgrid stability and avoid the dc-link voltage collapse is proposed when we perform short circuits at the FC terminals. In the first analysis, we evaluate the mathematical model to obtain the gain of the interleaved boost with voltage multiplier (IBVM) as a function of the hydrogen pressure, membrane resistances, and temperature, i.e., the effect of the chemical variables on the IBVM terminal voltage. In the second part, an adaptive gain scheduling to compensate the short-circuit effects on the FC terminals is designed. To analyze the feasibility of the proposed technique, the frequency and step response for different gain scheduling is performed. Finally, we present a set of experimental results to support the theoretical study and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.