All-electric ships are now a standard offering for energy/propulsion systems in boats. In this context, integrating fuel cells (FCs) as power sources in hybrid energy systems can be an interesting solution because of their high efficiency and low emission. The energy management strategy for different power sources has a great influence on the fuel consumption, dynamic performance and service life of these power sources. This paper presents a hybrid FC/battery power system for a low power boat. The hybrid system consists of the association of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) and battery bank. The mathematical models for the components of the hybrid system are presented. These models are implemented in Matlab/Simulink environment. Simulations allow analyzing the dynamic performance and power allocation according to a typical driving cycle. In this system, an efficient energy management system (EMS) based on operation states is proposed. This EMS strategy determines the operating point of each component of the system in order to maximize the system efficiency. Simulation results validate the adequacy of the hybrid power system and the proposed EMS for real ship driving cycles.

This study mainly investigates the current and speed control strategies of a doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG), which is applied to a tidal stream turbine (TST). Indeed, DFIG using integer-order PI (IOPI) controller has been widely proposed in the applications with a similar system, especially in wind energy conversion system (WECS). However, these conventional controllers cannot deal with the problems caused by the parameter variations satisfactorily under complex and harsh operation conditions, and may even deteriorate the performance. As a result, a fractional-order PI (FOPI) controller is considered to improve the efficiency and performance of DFIG-based TST in this paper. The FOPI controller, developed from the traditional IOPI controller and the fractional calculus theory, has a lot of prominent merits in many aspects, such as robustness, stability, and dynamic performance. In this paper, the proposed control strategies are embedded into the whole TST model which contains the tidal stream turbine, and the generator. The obtained simulation results demonstrate the prominent effectiveness and advantages of the proposed strategies compared with the conventional IOPI controller in terms of overshoot, static error, adjustment time, and robustness. It implies that FOPI controller could be a good candidate in TST applications.

Cascaded H-bridge Multilevel Inverter (CHMI) is widely used in industrial applications thanks to its many advantages. However, the reliability of a CHMI is decreased with the increase of its levels. Fault diagnosis techniques play a key role in ensuring the reliability of a CHMI. The performance of a fault diagnosis method depends on the characteristics of the extracted features. In practice, some extracted features may be very similar to ensure a good diagnosis performance at some H-bridges of CHMI. The situation becomes even worse in the presence of noise. To fix these problems, in this paper, signal denoising and data preprocessing techniques are firstly developed. Then, a Principal Components Rearrangement method (PCR) is proposed to represent the different features sufficiently distinct from each other. Finally, a PCR-based fault diagnosis strategy is designed. The performance of the proposed strategy is compared with other fault diagnosis strategies, based on a 7-level CHMI hardware platform.

Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is an effective way to recycle waste heat sources of a marine diesel engine. The aim of the present paper is to analyze and optimize the thermoeconomic performance of a Series Heat Exchangers ORC (SHEORC) for recovering energy from jacket water, scavenge air, and exhaust gas. The three sources are combined into three groups of jacket water (JW)→exhaust gas (EG), scavenge air (SA)→exhaust gas, and jacket water→scavenge air→exhaust gas. The influence of fluid mass flow rate, evaporation pressure, and heat source recovery proportion on the thermal performance and economic performance of SHEORC was studied. A single-objective optimization with power output as the objective and multi-objective optimization with exergy efficiency and levelized cost of energy (LCOE) as the objectives are carried out. The analysis results show that in jacket water→exhaust gas and jacket water→scavenge air→exhaust gas source combination, there is an optimal heat recovery proportion through which the SHEORC could obtain the best performance. The optimization results showed that R245ca has the best performance in thermoeconomic performance in all three source combinations. With scavenge air→exhaust, the power output, exergy efficiency, and LCOE are 354.19 kW, 59.02%, and 0.1150 $/kWh, respectively. Integrating the jacket water into the SA→EG group would not increase the power output, but would decrease the LCOE.