Eagle Strategy Based Maximum Power Point Tracker for Fuel Cell System

Abstract

A bunch of factors including the limited fossil resources and rising of fossil fuel price have been causes moving to create the new structure that is based on providing energy security, and protect the environment. One of the alternatives is the fuel cell (FC). Maximum power point tracker has an important role to increase the efficiency of the FC systems. One of the difficulties in maximum power point tracking methods is rapid changes in operating conditions which affects the maximum power point (MPP) of FC. The main contribution of this paper is presentation of a robust and reliable maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method for tracking of MPP of FC under fast variation of operating conditions. The proposed method is based on eagle strategy. In order to verify the accuracy of the proposed method, simulations are performed in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The proposed method is compared with perturb and observe (P&O) and fuzzy MPPT methods. The results show that eagle strategy based MPPT approach can track the MPP of fuel cell better than P&O and fuzzy MPPT. The main features of the proposed approach are high speed for duty cycle determining and high accuracy in MPP tracking of FC in the any contingency.