Advanced Regulatory Control Structure for Proton Exchange Membrane Water Electrolysis Systems

Due to the intermittent nature of most renewable energy sources, developing good and flexible control structures for green electrolysis systems is crucial for maintaining efficient and safe plant operation. This work uses the �top-down� section of Skogestad�s plantwide control procedure to propose a suitable control architecture for PEM electrolysis systems based on advanced regulatory control. Advanced regulatory control structures, such as active constraint control, may offer several advantages over MPC and AI-based control methods as they are computationally less expensive, less affected by model accuracy, easier to scale, and offer fast disturbance rejection. In our approach, we first mapped the constraint regions for the system. Then, we reduce the complexity by reformulating the optimization problem slightly, to remove some constraint regions to obtain a simpler solution structure that gives a negligible loss. Finally, we propose an active constraint control architecture using PI controllers and a selector for switching between the active constraint regions. We found that the system's fully constrained solution is close to the optimal solution, implying that our active constraint control approach may be used with little loss in efficiency. The proposed control structure was shown to perform well in dynamic simulations.