Development and research of energy management strategy to minimize hydrogen consumption of dual stack PEMFC system

The article discusses energy management strategy (EMS) for fuel cell-based power systems, allowing to minimize hydrogen consumption. The EMS must distribute the loads between fuel cells to ensure efficient operation of the system. However, the fuel cells characteristics can change significantly during its the operation, which will lead to a change in the optimal power distribution between fuel cells. The most common power sharing strategies for multistack systems – equal distribution and daisy chain are not able to effectively respond to these changes. The authors proposed a real-time EMS for a dual stack polymer proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) system to reduce hydrogen consumption. The initial data for the EMS are the actual characteristics of the fuel cells – the polarization curve and hydrogen consumption. A computer model was used to compare the effectiveness of the proposed EMS and deterministic ones for three multistack with two 1 kW PEMFC configurations. The hydrogen savings during the day for the proposed EMS were 7.24% compared to the equal distribution strategy and 11.42% compared to the daisy chain strategy.