Development And Application Of Fuel Cell Hardware-in-the-loop Simulation Platform

Hydrogen is not only one of the most potential clean energy in the world but also a hot spot in the field of new energy research,it has a variety of sources,clean,low carbon,flexible and efficient,as well as it's rich application scenarios.Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell(PEMFC)using hydrogen as fuel is simple in structure,fast in response,low in operating temperature,fast in start-up,high in specific power and clean without pollution.It is very suitable for application in the field of transportation,portable power sources and distributed power generation,which has gradually become the mainstream application technology at home and abroad.PEMFC is a complex dynamic system with nonlinearity,time-varying,strong coupling and hysteresis.Its dynamic characteristics are related to many disciplines such as hydrodynamics,thermodynamics and electrochemistry,which have an extremely important impact on the design,development and application of fuel cells.Especially when it is used at high power such as fuel cell electric vehicles,it presented serious nonlinearity,which is quite difficult to accurately control.A reasonable control strategy plays an important role in improving the performance and the life of fuel cell.In this paper,a set of PEMFC control strategy was developed through the V-Cycle development.The main contents of this paper included:First of all,based on the analysis of the system structure and operation mechanism of PEMFC,the simulation of PEMFC and its Balance of Plant(BoP)was built by the Thermolib toolkit of the MATLAB/Simulink platform.On the basis of verifying the feasibility of the model,the influence of parameters such as intake air temperature,pressure,flow rate,humidity and stack operating temperature on the output performance of the PEMFC was analyzed.Secondly,by analyzing the hardware interface and functional requirements of the PEMFC control system,the schematic design and PCB design of the controller were carried out.Based on the previous analysis of the operating parameters of the stack,a set of fuel cell control strategy model has been developed through the MATLAB/Simulink platform,which can make the generated power meet the load demand quickly and stably.According to the software requirements of the control system,a set of monitoring system software with human-computer interface was developed based on LabVIEW,which combined with the fuel cell control system to realize operation control of the fuel cell.Finally,the code of the PEMFC control strategy model was automatically generated and downloaded to the controller.Through hardware in the loop(HiL),the feasibility and reliability of the control strategy were comprehensively verified to improve the control strategy.The developed control strategy is applied to the actual fuel cell operation control.The results show that the proposed control strategy can meet the requirements of the steady-state and transient operating conditions of the fuel cell.