Power management of photovoltaic and fuel cell hybrid system for a constant-power-demand DC supply bus using complementary energy dispatch

Abstract

This paper presents a power management for a photovoltaic (PV) and fuel cell (FC) hybrid system that complementarily dispatches energies into a constant-power-demand DC bus (DCB) through a boost current (BCC) and Z-source voltage (ZSVC) converters. A novel power-increment-aided maximum power point tracking (PI-INC MPPT) with a duty detection is used to guide the PV-BCC to pump PV energy fast and accurate as well as provide a burst regulation to FC-ZSVC for quick energy dispatch. Accordingly, the feed-in PV energy is priority for hybrid in consideration of energy treasuring. An experiment presents the mutual energy dispatch behavior between PV and FC for a down-scale constant 250-W DCB under different solar insolation tests.