Project Description

MACPERCON is framed within the field of advanced automatic control systems applied to energy conversion systems. The project explores the way of analysing, designing and implementing novel controllers not used so far in the field of highly complex systems such as fuel cells. The particular strategy corresponds with the unfalsified control (UC), which is based on the idea of commutation of controllers depending on a desired system performance. Additionally, it is expected to complement the proposed control designs with other modern control strategies such as model predictive control (MPC) in order to manage control objectives that suit new performance indices related to the system behaviour. The idea of joining these two control techniques in complex systems has not been reported in the literature so far. MACPERCON also aims at providing tailored solutions to advance on purely theoretical issues as well as in current implementation topics.

MACPERCON Objectives
1. Study and analyse the application of UC techniques in complex dynamical systems with different operating modes, model uncertainty, external disturbances and composed by subsystems of different physical nature.
2. Analyse and simulate the UC concepts applied to engineering problems. As a special case study, the use of UC in PEM fuel cell based systems will be considered.
3. Implement the resulting UC strategies over the real fuel cell based systems at the IRI’s Fuel Cells Laboratory.
4. Compare the performances obtained when using the proposed control approaches with other strategies recently proposed in the literature.
5. Develop references management methodologies based on MPC for UC topologies in order to optimise efficiency and to increase the durability of the fuel cell based system while is improved its dynamic response.