Design and Implementation of 150W Portable Fuel Cell Power Pack

Existing energy sources convert chemical energy into mechanical energy, while fuel cell directly generates electricity through an electrochemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. Therefore, it has a lot of strong points such as high efficiency, zero emission, and etc. In addition, with the development of hydrogen preservation technique, some companies have been researching and releasing portable fuel cell power packs for specific applications like military equipment, automobile, and so on. However, there are some drawbacks to the fuel cell, high cost and slow dynamic response. In order to compensate these weak points, auxiliary energy storages could be applied to the fuel cell system. In this paper, the optimum structure for a 150W portable fuel cell power pack with a battery pack is selected considering the specification of the system, and the design process of main parts is described in detail. Here, main objectives are compact size, simple control, high efficiency, and low cost. Then, an automatic mode change algorithm, which converts the operating mode depending on the states of fuel cell stack, battery pack, and load, is introduced. Finally, performance of the designed prototype using the automatic mode change control is verified through experiments.