DC-Distributed Power System Modeling and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Evaluation of Fuel Cell-Powered Marine Vessel

Environmentally driven regulations are significantly affecting shipping in recent years, where the shipbuilding industry is required to comply with upcoming restrictions concerning polluting emissions. The all-electric ship (AES) is one of the most promising technologies for complying with the increasingly strict environmental regulations, improving fuel efficiency, and enhancing system dynamic performance. In this study, the dc-distributed power grid of an AES integrated with fuel cells and batteries has been configured using extensive electrification technology, where the system-level shipboard power plant has been modeled with the average modeling method. The model not only incorporates the hybrid power source integration but also the primary and secondary power management as a whole. In addition, a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) has been set up to replicate the real-time system behavior, which is essential for the verification of any optimal power management control algorithms to be developed in future work. Finally, both the mathematical and real-time models are validated against the full-scale hybrid shipboard power system.