Novel standalone hybrid solar/wind/fuel cell/battery power generation system

A novel standalone hybrid solar/wind/fuel cell (FC)/battery power generation system is designed and constructed. It consists of a photovoltaic (PV) array, a wind energy conversion system (WECS), a FC system, a battery bank, three unidirectional DC/DC converters, a bidirectional DC/DC converter, a unified maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controller, a control unit, and a DC/AC inverter. The contribution of this work is that the standalone hybrid solar/wind/FC/battery system presented in this work is the only large-scale constructed hybrid system reported in the literature that combines two renewable resources (solar and wind) with a battery bank and a fuel cell system used as standby power sources, and moreover, it maximally converts solar and wind energies into electric energy because it uses a novel fast and highly accurate unified MPPT technique that concurrently tracks the maximum power points of both PV system and WECS. Other works usually combine solar energy with wind energy, and are mostly simulation based works, and moreover, there is not any new MPPT consideration in them. It is experimentally verified that the constructed system is a perfect standalone hybrid solar/wind/FC/battery power source that efficiently produces electric energy under different environmental conditions such as cloudy sky, and so can be widely used in remote areas. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.