Dual Loop Cascade Control of a Stacked Interleaved Buck Converter for Electrolyzer Application
Publication Name
2022 IEEE IAS Global Conference on Emerging Technologies, GlobConET 2022
Abstract
Hydrogen production has piqued the scientific community's interest in the last two decades due to its inherent very low pollution when energy is derived from renewable energy sources (RESs). Due to the intermittent nature of RESs, the potential of generating and storing hydrogen using electrolyzer from excess energy from RESs, for later use in generating electricity using fuel cells to help RESs when their outputs are low, are considered an attractive solution. One of the best ways of producing hydrogen from RESs is using water electrolysis. Generally, in the water electrolysis systems, DC/DC buck converters are used, as the electrolyzer needs a very low input DC voltage to produce the hydrogen from deionized water. However, the traditional DC/DC step-down converters have several drawbacks such as ripples in the output current, low energy efficiency, and high switching losses. In this paper, a stacked interleaved buck converter (SIBC) has been investigated to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional DC/DC converter used in electrolyzer applications. The paper presents a novel control strategy for the proposed SIBC using a dual-loop PI control that controls both the current and the voltage across the load terminal. The dynamics of the proton exchange Membrane (PEM) electrolyzer is also considered for validating the results. The proposed strategy is validated using MATLAB/SIMULINK and the results show that the regulations of the voltage and current at the output side are significantly better than those from the traditional PI controlled DC/DC converters.
Open Access Status
This publication is not available as open access
First Page
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Last Page
1035