Modeling and Simulation of Fuel Cells for Applications in Distributed Generation

OLSEN BERENGUER, FERNANDO ADRIÁN; MOLINA, MARCELO GUSTAVO

San Juan

Congreso; 2º Congreso Iberoamericano de Hidrógeno y Fuentes Sustentables de Energía (HYFUSEN 2009); 2009

Instituto de Energía y Desarrollo Sustentable - Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA)

The world has been undergoing a deregulation process which allowed competition in the electricity generation sector. This situation is bringing the opportunity for electricity users to generate power by using small size generation systems with technologies considered emerging. All this is a consequence of the growth of the electrical market, the development of financial markets and the accelerated technical progress, allowing distributed generation (DG) to show up. Fuel cells (FC) emerge as a generation technology with a rapid development because they have auspicious characteristics, such as low pollutant emissions, silent operation and a limited number of moving parts. The commercially available fuel cells are solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) and proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC). In this work, modeling of a SOFC and a PEMFC are presented, including the fuel reformer and the electronic power conditioning system. The models are validated through digital simulation using the MATLAB/Simulink software package. Based on typical parameters for these fuel cell technologies, transient response simulations were performed for step changes in the power demand.