Fuel cell power generation systems provide a clean alternative to the conventional fossil fuel based systems. Fuel cell systems have a high efficiency and use easily available hydrocarbons like methane. Moreover, since the by-product is water, they have a very low environmental impact. The fuel cell system consists of several subsystems requiring a lot of effort from engineers in diverse areas. Fuel cell simulators can provide a convenient and economic alternative for testing the electrical subsystems such as converters and inverters.
This thesis proposes a low-cost and an easy-to-use fuel cell simulator using a programmable DC supply along with a control module written in LabVIEW. This simulator reproduces the electrical characteristics of a 5kW solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stack under various operating conditions. The experimental results indicate that the proposed simulator closely matches the voltage-current characteristic of the SOFC system under varying load conditions. Effects of non-electrical parameters like hydrogen flow rate are also modeled and these parameters are taken as dynamic inputs from the user. The simulator is customizable through a graphical user interface and allows the user to model other types of fuel cells with the respective voltage-current data.
The simulator provides an inexpensive and accurate representation of a solid oxide fuel cell under steady state and transient conditions and can replace an actual fuel cell during testing of power conditioning equipment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/2749 |
| Date | 01 November 2005 |
| Creators | Acharya, Prabha Ramchandra |
| Contributors | Enjeti, Prasad |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 789900 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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