Document 6597881
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Document 6597881
SSRG International Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (SSRG-IJEEE) – volume 1 Issue 9 –November 2014 Simulation of Three-Phase Transformer-less Neutral Point Clamped Inverter in Fuel Cell Systems J.Sanjeeva Rao*1, Indira Rani.G*2 M-Tech Student Department of EEE, VBIT, Aushapur, Ghatkesar, R.R (Dt), Telangana, India. Assistant Professor, Department of EEE, VBIT, Aushapur, Ghatkesar, R.R (Dt), Telangana, India. ABSTRACT In this paper we presents the traditional grid-connected Fuel cell inverter includes either a line frequency or a high frequency transformer between the inverter and grid. The transformer provides galvanic isolation between the grid and the Fuel cell. In order to increase the efficiency to reduce the size and cost of the effective solution is to remove the isolation transformer. The common mode current reduces the efficiency of power conversion stage affects the qualities of grid current deteriorate the electric magnetic compatibility and give rise to the safety threats. In order to eliminate the common mode leakage current in transformer-less Fuel cell system the concept of virtual DC bus is proposed in this paper. By connecting the grid neutral line directly to the negative pole of the DC bus the stray capacitance between the Fuel cell and the ground is bypassed. The CM ground leakage current can be suppressed completely. Virtual DC bus is created to provide the negative voltage level for the negative AC grid current generation. The virtual DC bus is realized with the switched capacitor technology that uses less number of elements. Therefore, the power electronic cost can be reduced. This topology can be modulated with the unipolar SPWM to reduce the output current ripple. A smaller filter inductor can be used to reduce the size and magnetic losses. The simulation result of the proposed topology using MATLAB/SIMULINK is presented. increasing and fulfilling of these higher energy demands is the main problem for the power suppliers or worldwide. FUEL CELLS are electrochemical devices that process H2 and oxygen to generate electric power, having water vapor as their only by-product. The voltage resulting from the reaction of the fuel and oxygen varies with the load, and ranges from 0.8 V at no-load to about 0.4 V for full-load. Due to their low output voltage, it becomes necessary to stack many cells in series to realize a practical system. For low-power applications, the number of cells that needs to be connected in series is small, but as power increases, the number of cells that are required in the stack increases rapidly [1], [2]. An example 100 V fuel cell stack consists of 250 cells in series and to produce 300 V at full-load requires 750 cells stacked in series. A conventional fuel cell system consists of a stack of cells and a dc–dc converter to step-up its terminal voltage and compensate for its no-load to full-load variation [3]–[5]. Since this fuel cell structure is equivalent to connecting several voltage sources in series, each with its own internal impedance [6], [7], the output power of the stack is limited by the state of the weakest cell. The state of a cell can be inferred from the voltage across its terminals, which is affected by parameters such as fuel and air pressure, and membrane humidity. Furthermore, if a stack contains malfunctioning or defective cells, the whole system has to be taken out of service until major repairs are done. Key words: Transformer-less Inverter, Common Mode Leakage Current, PWM. I. INTRODUCTION Form the long time, Fossil fuels, such as coal, natural gas, and petroleum are main supplier of energy to the world. But these are available with limited stock and non renewable sources of energy. And their use gives increased carbon dioxide emissions, environmental pollution, global warming and climate change. But with all above mentioned problems the energy demand of world is still ISSN: 2348 – 8379 Fig1. Utility scale fuel cell stack and dc–dc/dc–ac converter. www.internationaljournalssrg.org Page 66 SSRG International Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (SSRG-IJEEE) – volume 1 Issue 9 –November 2014 II. RELATED WORK It is known that the 19th Century was the century of the steam engine and the 20 th Century was the century of the internal combustion engine. On the other hand, the 21 st Century will be likely to be the century of the fuel cell, and as a result fuel cells will revolutionize the way to currently generate electric power offering the prospect of supplying the world with clean, efficient, sustainable electrical energy because they use hydrogen as a fuel. A fuel cell is defined as an electrical cell, which unlike other storage devices can be continuously fed with a fuel in order that the electrical power can be maintained. The fuel cells convert hydrogen or hydrogen-containing fuels, directly into electrical energy, heat, and water through the electrochemical reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Since hydrogen and oxygen gases are electrochemically converted into water and energy as shown in the above overall reaction, fuel cells have many advantages over heat engines: high efficiency and actually quiet operation and, if hydrogen is the fuel, no pollutants are released into the atmosphere. As a result, fuel cells can continuously generate electric power as long as hydrogen and oxygen are available. Among several types of the fuel cells categorized by the electrolyte used, four types are promising for distributed generation systems: Phosphoric Acid fuel cell (PAFC), Solid Oxide fuel cell (SOFC), Molten Carbonate fuel cell (MCFC), Proton-Exchange- Membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). All types of the fuel cells produce electricity by electrochemical reaction of hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen can be easily obtained from compressing air. On the contrary, hydrogen gas required to produce DC power is indirectly gained from the reformer using fuels such as natural gas, propane, methanol, gasoline or from the electrolysis of water. A typical configuration of an autonomous fuel cell system is described in Figure 1.2. As shown in this figure, the fuel cell plant consists of three main parts: a reformer, stack, and a power conditioning unit (PCU). First, the reformer produces hydrogen gas from fuels and then provides it for the stack. Second, the stack has many unit cells in series to generate a higher voltage needed for their applications because a single cell that consists of electrolyte, separators, and plates, produces approximately 0.7 V DC. Last, the PCU including power converters converts a low voltage DC from the fuel cell to a high voltage DC and/or a sinusoidal AC. Figure.2 Basic fuel cell operation Figure shows a block diagram of basic fuel cell operation. As illustrated in this figure, the fuel such as natural gas, coal, methanol, etc. is fed to the fuel electrode (anode) and oxidant (oxygen) is supplied to the air electrode (cathode). The oxygen fed to the cathode allows electrons from the external electrical circuit to produce oxygen ions. The ionized oxygen goes to the anode through the solid electrolyte and combines with hydrogen to form water. Even though chemical reactions at anode and cathode may be a little different according to the types of fuel cells, the overall reaction can be described as follows: Fig:3 Configuration of the fuel cell system Overall reaction: 2 H2 (gas) + O2 (gas) → 2 H2O + energy (electricity, heat) ISSN: 2348 – 8379 www.internationaljournalssrg.org Page 67 SSRG International Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (SSRG-IJEEE) – volume 1 Issue 9 –November 2014 Types of fuel cells: Proton exchange fuel cells: In the archetypal hydrogen–oxygen proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) design, a protonconducting polymer membrane, (the electrolyte), separates the anode and cathode sides. This was called a "solid polymer electrolyte fuel cell" (SPEFC) in the early 1970s, before the proton exchange mechanism was well-understood. (Notice that "polymer electrolyte membrane" and "proton exchange mechanism" result in the same acronym.) On the anode side, hydrogen diffuses to the anode catalyst where it later dissociates into protons and electrons. These protons often react with oxidants causing them to become what is commonly referred to as multi-facilitated proton membranes. The protons are conducted through the membrane to the cathode, but the electrons are forced to travel in an external circuit (supplying power) because the membrane is electrically insulating. On the cathode catalyst, oxygen molecules react with the electrons (which have traveled through the external circuit) and protons to form water. The materials used in fuel cells differ by type. In a typical membrane electrode assembly (MEA), the electrode–bipolar plates are usually made of metal, nickel or carbon nanotubes, and are coated with a catalyst (like platinum, nano iron powders or palladium) for higher efficiency. Carbon paper separates them from the electrolyte. The electrolyte could be ceramic or a membrane. III. PROPOSED WORK To take advantage of the modular fuel cell stack, an appropriate dc–dc converter and control scheme are required. The converter should have as many independently controllable inputs as there are sections in the stack. In addition, since the positive terminal of one section in the stack also serves as the negative terminal for the next section, the converter should provide isolation between its input and output to avoid circulating currents. A converter meeting these specifications can be constructed by using an arrangement of isolated dc–dc converter modules, where the inputs of each module are connected across each of the sections of the stack and their outputs are connected in series in order to add the output voltages of the different modules, thus obtaining a higher output voltage. Such a modular dc–dc converter is shown in Fig. 9, where the converter is composed of three push–pull modules. As discussed earlier, another advantage of constructing a fuel cell stack with several sections is that faulty portions of the stack can be bypassed, while the rest of the stack can continue operation. To implement this function, each of the modules used to construct the dc–dc converter should be able to stop extracting power from the section they are connected to and set its output impedance to zero. This function can be accomplished by removing the gating signals to the transistors. In addition, it is necessary to add a switch (Sx ) at the output of each module to shortcircuit the output capacitor of the module and bypass it. In order to optimize the power extraction from each of the sections in the fuel cell, an appropriate control scheme needs to be devised. From Figs. 7 and 8, it can be observed that the voltage cross the terminals of each section in the stack is a good indication of how much power it can generate; thus, this information can be used to better distribute the power extracted from each section. A section producing a higher voltage can generate more power than a section that produces a lower voltage. Therefore, by controlling the load current on each section in the stack as a function of the voltage, they produce results in healthier sections supplying more power than underperforming sections. This, in turn, reduces internal losses and improves the overall efficiency of the system. Since the outputs of the modules are connected in series, their output currents io are identical. Now, if the modules are constructed by push– pull converters, the input current of every module is given by (6), where Dn is the duty cycle of the nth module and N1 and N2 are the transformer primary and secondary turns (6) ISSN: 2348 – 8379 www.internationaljournalssrg.org Page 68 SSRG International Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (SSRG-IJEEE) – volume 1 Issue 9 –November 2014 controllers. The calculation of the reference signals for each of the modules is done digitally by means of a DSP. The reference signals are then feed to analog controllers located on each of the dc–dc modules. IV. Fig.4.Proposed control scheme. Thus, the input current of each module can be controlled by setting an appropriate duty cycle. The duty cycle for each module is calculated as shown in Fig. 10. In this block diagram, the output voltage of the converter is maintained constant to the value set by Vo, ref . The output of the main voltage loop compensator is then used to calculate the required duty cycle for each dc–dc converter by multiplying it with the corresponding reference signal for each module. These reference signals are calculated by taking into account the voltage produced by each of the sections in the stack and the number of modules that compose the dc–dc converter. Each of the reference signals is calculated by the weighting function shown as SIMULATION RESULTS To verify the operation of the proposed fuel cell stack and converter, a laboratory prototype was built. The test system is composed of a 12-V/150-WH2 –air PEM modular fuel cell stack consisting of three sections of eight cells, each with an active area of 50 cm2 , and a modular dc–dc converter composed of three push–pull modules. The dc–dc converter is designed to supply a 22-V load; thus, if all the sections in the fuel cell produce the same voltage across their terminals, each module needs to provide one-third of the total output voltage Vo and output power. However, since the dc–dc converter has to be designed for continue operation under the condition of having. (7) Where VSn is the voltage produced by the “nth” section in the fuel cell stack, VSi is the voltage produced by the “ith” section in the stack, and NAC is the total number of active sections in the stack. Thus, the reference signal for the “nth” module is given by the ratio between the voltage produced by the “nth” section in stack and the total voltage produced by the stack. The number of active sections is defined by all the sections that produce a voltage above a minimum value. Now, if one of the sections produces a voltage below this threshold level, then that section can be considered faulty. Thus, it cannot produce power and needs to be discarded. In this case, the controller reduces NAC by 1 and sets the reference signal to the respective module to zero. Additionally, this has the effect of increasing the reference signals of the remaining modules to compensate for the loss of one stack section. The implementation of this control scheme can be carried out by combining digital and analog ISSN: 2348 – 8379 www.internationaljournalssrg.org Page 69 SSRG International Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (SSRG-IJEEE) – volume 1 Issue 9 –November 2014 Fig. 6. Simulated output voltage (vAO) and load current (iA) in phase a with load 2 for (a) SVPWM, (b) 3MV and (c) 2MV1Z. Fig. 5. Simulated leakage current (iL) of the threelevel PV inverter with Load 1: (a) SVPWM, (b) 3MV and (c) 2MV1Z. Fig. 7. Simulated output voltage (vAO) and load current (iA) in phase a for SVPWM using Ts/2. V. CONCLUSION The proposed idea a novel inverter topology is proposed with virtual DC bus concept by adopting the switched topology. This topology is suitable for small three phase power applications where as the output current is relatively small so that the current stress caused by switched capacitor does not cause the serious reliable problems for power device capacitors. The proposed virtual DC bus concept provides a promising solution for the transformer less grid connected Fuel Cell inverters. REFERENCES [1] T. Kerekes, R. Teodorescu, P. Rodríguez, Vázquez, G. E. Aldabas, "A New High-Efficiency Single-Phase Transformerless PV Inverter Topology," Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.58, no.1, pp.184-191, Jan. 2011. [2] O. Lopez, F.D. Freijedo, A.G. Yepes, P. Fernandez-Comesaa, J. Malvar, R. 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