Grid Interactive Photovoltaic-Fuel Cell based Hybrid Generation System with Active and Reactive Power Control

In this paper, Photovoltaic (PV)-Fuel cell (FC) based grid interactive hybrid generation system is presented. The power generated by a PV system is highly dependent on weather condition. Hence, Fuel cell is used as back up source to supply the load demand along with PV under varying weather conditions. The PV-FC based hybrid generation system is developed using the model equations of PV and FC in the MATLAB/Simulink® environment. The PV-FC hybrid generation system is integrated with grid in two stages: dc-dc boost converter and three phase dc-ac inverter. Two separate dc-dc boost converters are used each with PV and FC system. In PV system, the dc-dc converter is used for Maximum Power Point (MPP) tracking and in FC system, the dc-dc converter is used for boosting the FC voltage. The MPP is tracked using fuzzy logic based controller under varying weather conditions. The power management algorithm proposed in this paper extracts and utilizes the maximum available power from PV array to supply the load demand. The FC is used to supply additional load demand higher than the maximum available PV power. The inverter injects the PV and FC power to load/grid in a controlled manner. The reference currents for current controller are generated using instantaneous power (p-q) theory. The hybrid generation system is tested under different load and weather conditions. The simulation results validate proposed power management algorithm for PV-FC based grid interactive hybrid generation system under varying environmental and load conditions.