A Comprehensive Review on Fuel Cell Technologies and its Application in Microgrids

Demand of electrical power in this century is increasing rapidly. The conventional power sources are not sufficient to meet this growing demands as they are going to be depleted one day. So, the focus now a days is been shifted to renewable energy sources as they are in abundance. Various renewable sources we deal with are solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, tidal and biomass. Apart from these generation techniques, fuel cells technology is also used as one of the technique in Distributed generation. This technique is environment friendly, efficient and have various applications. A broad, extensive and comprehensive review of fuel cells has been done in this paper. Classification of fuel cell, comparison of its types on various parameters such as efficiency, output voltage, temperature etc., polarization characteristics of fuel cell, applications and challenges have been presented. The power generation through fuel cell is explained here. The various power conditioning units required for interfacing of fuel cell with grid has also been discussed in this paper.