Abstract
The output power of the fuel cell depends on the operating conditions, such as the temperature and membrane water content. Therefore, a robust maximum power point tracking (MPPT) approach is highly required to ensure the operation of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) at the maximum power point. A new hybrid perturb & observe and type-2 fuzzy-based adaptive step size MPPT for PEMFC system is proposed to enhance the dynamic response and eliminates the oscillations around maximum power point at steady state. The type-2 fuzzy approach has been used to scale the variable step size of conventional perturb & observe algorithm to extract the maximum available power of the PEMFC system. The proposed hybrid controller has been tested and validated using MATLAB software via modeling of the fuel cell power system composed of 7 kW PEMFC powering a resistive load through a DC-DC boost converter. Comparative simulation results prove that our proposed hybrid P&O type-2 fuzzy-based MPPT reduces the response time between 14.62 and 84.72% compared to the P&O type-1 fuzzy-based MPPT. The response time is also reduced between 43.99 and 88.04% compared to the conventional P&O fixed step size MPPT. In addition, the proposed controller decreases the steady-state oscillation to an interval of 66.67% to 70.97% compared to the P&O type-1 fuzzy-based MPPT and an interval of 72.73% to 84.85% compared to the conventional P&O fixed step size MPPT.