A novel Fuzzy-PI-based control for PEM fuel cell emulator based on a buck converter

This paper presents a new control technique for proton exchange membrane fuel cell emulator. This technique is based on a cascade loop concept that uses a fuzzy logic controller for the voltage outer loop, and a conventional PI controller for the current inner loop. The emulator is designed to behave exactly as proton exchange membrane fuel cell based on its mathematical model and experimental data. The fuel cell emulator (FC emulator) is composed of a DC/DC buck converter that is controlled by the proposed technique. To test our emulator, the converter is connected to a variable DC load, the scenario of the load is chosen to be hard and have abrupt changes. To show the performance of our technique, a comparison is made with a cascade PI–PI controller. The simulation results show the high performance of our technique over the other one. The error between the calculated FC voltage reference and the controlled voltage (measured voltage) is smaller than in case of PI–PI controller. The contribution of our controller can be seen in terms of response time. The results show that our proposed controller is faster than the other one.