Tracking Techniques for the PEMFC in Portable Applications

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) exhibits nonlinear output characteristics which may result in low efficiency and low power operation of the PEMFC. Different tracking techniques are used to track the maximum power point (MPP) to extract maximum power and maximum efficiency point (MEP) to operate at maximum efficiency. However, the output power and efficiency of the PEMFC should be high for portable applications but they are low at MEP and MPP respectively. In this paper, an alternative tracking technique referred to as the midpoint tracking (MDT) technique is proposed to overcome the limitations of the MEP and MPP tracking techniques for portable applications. A detailed analysis of the model-independent tracking techniques based on simulation results is presented. It is found that the proposed MDT technique is the most suitable technique with high output power and high efficiency compared with the MEP and MPP respectively.