Off-Grid Fuel Cell System for High Power Quality Applications

摘要

There are a large number of critical loads, such as information technology, telecommunication, medical equipment and industrial process controls, which require high power quality. Conventional approaches to provide high power quality levels include battery based uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and emergency generators, using in most cases fossil fuels. These approaches suffer from reliability/maintenance problems associated with battery operating constraints, and from environmental impacts associated with the emissions of particles by the emergency generators. Systems that use fuel cells as electric energy sources are starting to be seen as a possibility for onsite energy production since they can work with high efficiency and without harmful emissions. In this work it is proposed a structure of a fuel cell system composed by a GenCore proton exchange membrane (PEM) 5 kW Fuel Cell system from Plug Power and a single-phase inverter, which can operate either as an off-grid system or as a backup system in a high power quality system.