Design of linear controllers applied to an ethanol steam reformer for PEM fuel cell applications

Abstract

This paper focuses on the design of a controller for a low temperature ethanol steam reformer for the production of hydrogen to feed a Protonic Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell. It describes different control structures for the reformer and treats the control structure selection of this Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system. For each control structure, decentralised 2x2 controllers with Proportional Integral (PI) control actions in each control loop are implemented. The PI parameters are tuned and the performance of the different linear controllers is compared through simulation. For the evaluation of the proposed controllers, the dynamic response for different initial conditions and changes in the references is analysed, as well as the behaviour of the controlled system against disturbances.