Hydrogen economy of the fuel cell hybrid power system optimized by air flow control to mitigate the effect of the uncertainty about available renewable power and load dynamics

A new Energy Management Strategy to reduce the hydrogen consumption is proposed for Hybrid Power Systems based on Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell system used as backup source. The Energy Management Strategy uses a Load Following control loop of requested load demand on DC bus and an optimization control loop to improve the fuel economy based on the Global Extremum Seeking algorithm applied to the air flow rate. The performance of proposed strategy is compared to the one obtained with the Static Feed-Forward strategy considering three case studies for the optimization function used in different scenarios for power flow on DC bus (variable or constant load demand, without or with variable renewable energy power).