Efficiency Boosting for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Power System Using New MPPT Method

This paper presents a new maximum power point tracker (MPPT) method for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) power system. The aim of this work is, extracting the maximum power from the fuel cell by acting on the DC/DC converter, and ensure an adequate robustness against load disturbances. Conventional controller (PI) and sliding mode control (SMC) are applied to the DC/DC boost converter. The model and the controllers are implemented in the MATLAB and SIMULINK environment. Simulation results indicate that the SMC offers fast and accurate converging to the MPP compared to the well-known PI controller.