Abstract
The output power of the fuel cell (FC) is mainly depending on the membrane water content, temperature, the hydrogen and oxygen partial pressures. The polarization curve has one global maximum power to be tracked. Therefore, a robust maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is highly required to follow the optimal operating point under any operating conditions. In this article, a recent approach of forensic-based investigation (FBI) algorithm is proposed to identify the optimal parameters of fractional order PID-based MPPT with proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell. FBI is selected due to its high accuracy and requirement of less computational efforts. The considered objective function to be minimized is the error between the voltage at maximum power (V MP ) and the actual one at FC terminals. To prove the robustness of the proposed methodology, four cases of operating conditions are analyzed which are constant membrane water content and temperature, constant membrane water content with variable temperature, variable membrane water content with constant temperature, and variable membrane water content with variable temperature. The obtained results are compared to other approaches such as incremental resistance (INCR), particle swarm optimizer (PSO), invasive weed optimizer (IWO), sin-cosine algorithm (SCA), and artificial ecosystem optimizer (AEO). In case (1), the proposed FBI-FOPID succeeded in achieving maximum power of 5185.101 W. While the minimum objective functions in the second, third, and fourth cases are 2.5736 V, 1.4436 V, and 1.1568 V respectively obtained via the proposed approach. The comparison confirmed the superiority of the proposed FBI-based MPPT compared with other methods.