A New Maximum Power Point Tracking Method for PEM Fuel Cells Based On Water Cycle Algorithm

Maximum Power Point (MPP) tracker has an important role in the performance of fuel cell (FC) systems improvement. Tow parameters which have effect on the Fuel cell output power are temperature and membrane water. So contents make the MPP change by with variations in each parameter. In this paper, a new maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method for Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell is proposed. This method is based on water cycle algorithm (WCA). In order to show the performance and the accuracy of the proposed method, a system consisting of one Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell, one boost converter, one WCA based MPP tracker and one load is considered. WCA determines voltage corresponding to the maximum power of FC then one PID controller tunes the duty cycle of the boost converter. The performance of the proposed method is compared with three other MPPT methods (Perturb and Observe, Voltage-based MPPT and current-based MPPT). The results show that the proposed MPPT method has a high accuracy and a fast response, they also indicate that the proposed method has the better performance in comparison with the other studied methods.