Disturbance rejection control of a fuel cell power plant in a grid-connected system

Interface of a fuel cell plant to power grid is challenging because of the high nonlinearities of the fuel cell plant and the power conditioning system (PCS). This paper focuses on the control of grid-connected solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) power plant that is subject to varying load and uncertain network parameters. To this end, Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) is utilized to improve the performance of the PCS consisting of a dc-dc converter and a dc-ac inverter. ADRC is used in the dc-dc converter to stabilize the dc link voltage and yield a robust performance against the nonlinearity. Used in the dc-ac inverter, ADRC eliminates the steady-state error and is insensitive to the high-frequency noise. Simulation results show that, for grid current control, ADRC achieves a more robust performance than the conventional proportional-integral (PI) controller. Moreover, the total harmonic distortions (THDs) of the output current controlled by ADRC are always below 5% in spite of the variation in the load demand and network parameters.