The disturbance rejection design based on physical feedforward for solid oxide fuel cell

The output voltage control of the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) is challenging due to the strong nonlinearity, modelling uncertainty, the dramatic change of the external current load and constraints on the amplitudes and change rates of the actuator. Besides, the desired range of the fuel utilization is another difficult for the control strategy. In this paper, Active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is proposed to handle the nonlinearity, uncertainty and the external disturbance, and physical feedforward is designed to speed up the response of the whole system and keep the fuel utilization in the desired range. Instead of the SOFC model, the design of physical feedforward is based on the definition of fuel utilization which is featured by simplicity, generality and effectiveness. Simulation results show that the proposed control strategy has smaller variation range of the fuel utilization, shorter time of the changing process of the output voltage and better robustness than others control strategies.