Development of a fuel cell-lead acid battery hybrid system

Abstract

With the increasing demand for fossil fuels, it is becoming a more challenging task to explore new reserves of petroleum under the Earth. With this trend, it is projected that the world‟s fuel resources will be depleted by the year 2038. Thus, renewable and alternative energy sources have been invested and researched on extensively for the past few decades and this includes fuel cells technologies. On the other hand, there is a need to improve the fuel economy of automobiles as it has a crucial impact on the depleted fuel resources. Thus, the most promising technologies are hybrid vehicles. A hybrid vehicle is one that uses more than one source of power for the vehicle‟s propulsion. Examples of hybrid vehicles are fuel cell powered vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles. This project investigates the integration of both fuel cells and lead acid batteries in a hybrid system for the propulsion of a motor. The different types of hybrid configurations were discussed but this project would focus on the parallel hybrid configuration of fuel cells and lead acid batteries. Simulation of the proposed hybrid system was done using Simulink, a computer simulation tool to predict and observe the behaviour of the system. The simulation result, which is discussed in the later part of the report, demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed hybrid system.