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Control of an ultrahigh speed centrifugal compressor for the air management of fuel cell systems

Air compressor supplying the oxygen to the stack is an important component in the fuel cell systems. The compressor can consumes up to 20 % of the generated power in the most severe cases. The selecting of the compressor and corresponding control are directly related to the performance of the fuel cell. The size and weight of the air compressor has to be reduced to make them more feasible for automotive applications. Moreover, the control of the air compression system is also an important issue, which affects the efficiency and the safety of the fuel cell. To avoid oxygen starvation of the stack, the mass flow of the supplied air has to be controlled appropriately according to the load demand. Meanwhile, the pressure should not have large deviations or ripples which may damage the stack membrane.A recently proposed disturbance decoupling control (DDC) is used for the centrifugal compression system. DDC treats the internal interactions as a disturbance and then eliminates them in the control. The performance of the DDC is compared with a decentralized sliding mode controller. Through the comparison of those two controllers, the results show that the proposed DDC performs better in both the steady state and dynamic conditions, making the centrifugal compressor is capable of applying to the fuel cell in automotive applications. On a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbench, the proposed controller is validated with a 10 kW fuel cell model under varied load demands. Moreover, a surge avoidance method, namely reference limiter, is proposed to prevent the compressor from surging. The experimental results show that the operation is restricted to the right of the surge line.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-01002037
Date10 December 2013
CreatorsZhao, Dongdong
PublisherUniversité de Technologie de Belfort-Montbeliard
Source SetsCCSD theses-EN-ligne, France
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypePhD thesis

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