Real-time strategy for active power sharing in a fuel cell powered battery charger

This paper presents a real-time strategy for active power sharing in a fuel cell powered battery charging station. This control scheme can adjust the charging currents of the batteries being simultaneously charged in real-time according to the estimated state-of-charge (SOC) which is obtained by estimating the battery open-circuit voltage with current correction and linearly fitting between the open-circuit voltage and the state-of-charge. The charge controller that executes the real-time strategy is designed and implemented in Matlab/Simulink for both system simulation and experimental tests. Simulation results show that all batteries can become fully charged simultaneously with the real-time strategy and the estimation method for battery state-of-charge is effective for the active power sharing strategy. Experiment results validate the simulation and show that the battery state-of-charge estimation method is practical. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.