Examination, Modelling and Simulation of Hydrogen Generation Cell for Complex Renewable Energy System

Nowadays, the growing need for energy from renewable sources and growing revulsion towards fossil and nuclear fuels turns sustainable and green energy in the foreground. Producing (electrical) energy from renewable sources hardly means difficulties but the storage of the energy not consumed immediately is a great engineering challenge. In the present paper a complex model has been developed by investigating renewable energy sources, converting currently unnecessary energy to Hydrogen for storage purposes and feeding the main grid. A measurement based model of a Hydrogen generating cell developed for simulation of complex energetic system is presented in this paper. The parameter estimation of the static model has been performed based on measurement data collected during the detailed examination of a demonstration cell. Series of experiments has been carried out on a HHO gas producing dry cell in order to find out if there are optimal electrolyte concentration, current value, or geometric parameter (distance between plates) values for this equipment. During the measurement KOH electrolyte solution was used while different signals has been measured, for example cell voltage, gas production value. As a result of the experiments, a cell operating in an optimal way has been developed. The novel element of this work is the temperature and concentration dependent Mat lab Simulink model of the hydrogen generation cell. Using this model, a dynamic simulator of a complex domestic power plant using renewable energy source and H-2 generation cell become available. Hydrogen generation enables the long range storage of spare electric energy collected but not consumed or injected into the low voltage grid. The generated Hydrogen can be consumed by vehicles for transportation purposes or it can be applied in fuel cells generating direct electrical energy for energy-deficient low voltage network situations. Energetic situations potentially occurring in practice have been simulated in the complex model. Several hours of simulations showed that the presented H-2 generating cell model performed well. Producing H-2 from excess energy is not a brand new invention. This is the alternative way to store and convert renewable energy for further utilization. The produced Hydrogen can be used to store, to use in power cell to convert back to electric energy or to use in Hydrogen propulsion vehicles. Among the numerous realized H-2 producing applications the most important class is when the energy consumption and the quantity of produced H-2 is controlled. When the power consumption and generation are continuous (and not necessarily deterministic) function of time, the H-2 production depends solely on the excess energy of the grid.