System indentification and control of hydrogen energy storage system comprising PEM electrolyzer metal hydride storage tank and PEM fuel cell

Abstract

Energy storage plays an important role in the development and operation of environment friendly renewable energy systems. An essential feature of most renewable energy sources is their intermittent availability that conflicts with the requirement of reliable electrical supply. One way to overcome this problem is to use an appropriate large storage system. In general, hydrogen is well suited for the storage system, because of its inherent high mass energy density and longevity of energy storage. In this research work, hydrogen based energy storage system is focused. The hydrogen gas storage system includes many approaches and one of the technologies is to store hydrogen in metal hydride form which is able to store relatively large amount of hydrogen gas safely and with long term stability at low temperature and pressure. This hydrogen energy storage system comprises of Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) electrolyzer, Metal hydride hydrogen storage tank and PEM Fuel cell. In order to analyze the production, storage and utilization of hydrogen for different operating conditions and to control the process effectively, it is required to develop a mathematical model for PEM electrolyzer, Metal hydride hydrogen storage tank and PEM Fuel cell. The models presented here are based on the dynamic behavior of rigorous models and experimental data available in literature. newlineThe novelty of this research work is the use of the system identification techniques for finding the realistic model structure for PEM electrolyzer, Metal hydride storage tank and PEM fuel cell and analyzing their stability. For the development of model structures using system identification techniques, there is no need of the details of various phenomena taking place inside the hydrogen energy storage system. The only requirement is measured input and output data of PEM electrolyzer, Metal hydride hydrogen storage tank and PEM fuel cell. newline