Comparative Study of Adaptive Hamiltonian Control Laws for DC Microgrid Stabilization: An Fuel Cell Boost Converter

Future smart grids can be seen as a system of interlinked microgrids, including small-scale local power systems. They consist of main power sources, external loads, and energy storage devices. In these microgrids, the negative incremental impedance behavior of constant power loads (CPLs) is of major concern since it can lead to instability and oscillations. To cope with this issue, this article aims to propose a comparative study of adaptive Hamiltonian control laws, also known as interconnection and damping–assignment–passivity–based controllers (IDA-PBC). These control laws are developed to ensure the stability of the DC output voltage of a boost converter supplied by a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) source. To validate the develop control laws, experiments have been performed on a fit test bench including a real 2.5 kW PEMFC stack (hydrogen is supplied by a reformer engine), a DC-DC step-up circuit, and a real-time controller dSPACE (implementation of the control laws). Moreover, a comparative study has been carried out between the proposed three adaptive Hamiltonian control laws and a classic linear cascaded proportional–integral (PI) control law. The obtained results by simulations through MATLAB/SimulinkTM and experimentally have allowed demonstrating that the third Hamiltonian control law presents the best performances over the other control laws.