A novel design of air breathing fuel cells uninterrupted power supply

Abstract

The proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is a kind of clean energy, and has a large advantage in the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) which is used in telecommunication base stations. The air-breathing fuel cells stack can simplify the whole system design and development. In this paper, the system configuration is introduced. Two 2.5kw air-breathing PEMFC are adopted to avoid the lower power operation of the PEMFC stack. Each stack has two cooling fans which also provide the enough reactive air, but another two fans are used as the redundancies. This design significantly improves the reliability of the system. The operating states of the system are drilled down. The control system framework is designed by using embedded-PCs. The results indicate that, the air breathing fuel cells UPS operate steadily, and have obvious advantage as emergency power in telecommunication base stations.