Hydrogen is recognized as a promising and attractive energy carrier to decarbonize the sectors responsible for global warming, such as electricity production, industry, and transportation. However, although hydrogen releases only water as a result of its reaction with oxygen through a fuel cell, the hydrogen production pathway is currently a challenging issue since hydrogen is produced mainly from thermochemical processes (natural gas reforming, coal gasification). On the other hand, hydrogen production through water electrolysis has attracted a lot of attention as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by using low-carbon sources such as renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro) and nuclear energy. In this context, by providing an environmentally-friendly fuel instead of the currently-used fuels (unleaded petrol, gasoline, kerosene), hydrogen can be used in various applications such as transportation (aircraft, boat, vehicle, and train), energy storage, industry, medicine, and power-to-gas. This article aims to provide an overview of the main hydrogen applications (including present and future) while examining funding and barriers to building a prosperous future for the nation by addressing all the critical challenges met in all energy sectors.

This article provides a survey on the adoption of LoRa in the agricultural field and reviews state-of-the-art solutions for smart agriculture, analyzing the potential of this technology in different infield applications. In particular, we consider four reference scenarios, namely, irrigation systems, plantation and crop monitoring, tree monitoring, and livestock monitoring, which exhibit heterogeneous requirements in terms of network bandwidth, density, sensors’ complexity, and energy demand, as well as latency in the decision process. We discuss how LoRa-based solutions can work in these scenarios, analyzing their scalability, interoperability, network architecture, and energy efficiency. Finally, we present possible future research directions and point out some open issues which might become the main research trends for the next years.

The main objective of the article is to provide a thorough review of currently used AC-DC converters for alkaline and proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers in power grid or wind energy conversion systems. Based on the current literature, this article aims at emphasizing the advantages and drawbacks of AC-DC converters mainly based on thyristor rectifier bridges and chopper-rectifiers. The analysis is mainly focused on the current issues for these converters in terms of specific energy consumption, current ripple, reliability, efficiency, and power quality. From this analysis, it is shown that thyristors-based rectifiers are particularly fit for high-power applications but require the use of active and passive filters to enhance the power quality. By comparison, the association combination of the chopper-rectifier can avoid the use of bulky active and passive filters since it can improve power quality. However, the use of a basic chopper (i.e., buck converter) presents several disadvantages from the reliability, energy efficiency, voltage ratio, and current ripple point of view. For this reason, new emerging DC-DC converters must be employed to meet these important issues according to the availability of new power switching devices. Finally, based on the authors’ experience in power conversion for PEM electrolyzers, a discussion is provided regarding the future challenges that must face power electronics for green hydrogen production based on renewable energy sources.

This paper presents a single-phase shunt active power filter (APF) for current harmonic compensation based on neural filtering. The shunt active filter, realized by a current-controlled inverter, has been used to compensate a nonlinear current load by receiving its reference from a neural adaptive notch filter. This is a recursive notch filter for the fundamental grid frequency (50 Hz) and is based on the use of a linear adaptive neuron (ADALINE). The filter's parameters are made adaptive with respect to the grid frequency fluctuations. A phase-locked loop system is used to extract the fundamental component from the coupling point voltage and to estimate the actual grid frequency. The current control of the inverter has been performed by a multiresonant controller. The estimated grid frequency is fed to the neural adaptive filter and to the multiresonant controller. In this way, the inverter creates a current equal in amplitude and opposite in sign to the load harmonic current, thus producing an almost sinusoidal grid current. An automatic tuning of the multiresonant controller is implemented, which recognizes the largest three harmonics of the load current to be compensated by the APF. The stability analysis of the proposed control system is shown. The methodology has been applied in numerical simulations and experimentally to a properly devised test setup, also in comparison with the classic sinusoidal current control based on the P-Q theory.

This paper deals with a single-phase distributed generation (DG) system with active power filtering (APF) capability, devised for utility current harmonic compensation. The idea is to integrate the DG unit functions with shunt APF capabilities, because the DG is connected in parallel to the grid. With the proposed approach, control of the DG unit is performed by injecting into the grid a current with the same phase and frequency of the grid voltage and with an amplitude depending on the power available from renewable sources. On the other hand, load harmonic current compensation is performed by injecting into the alternating current system harmonic currents like those of the load but with an opposite phase, thus keeping the line current almost sinusoidal. Both detection of the grid voltage fundamental and computation of the load harmonic compensation current have been performed by two neural adaptive filters with the same structure, one in a configuration ldquonotchrdquo and the other in the complementary configuration ldquoband.rdquo The ldquonotchrdquo filter has been used to compute the compensation current by eliminating only the contribution of the fundamental of the load current, whereas the ldquobandrdquo configuration is able to extract the fundamental of the coupling point voltage. Furthermore, because the active power generation and the APF features require current control of components at different frequencies, respectively, a multiresonant current controller has been adopted. The methodology has been tested successfully both in numerical simulation and experimentally on a suitably devised test setup. The stability analysis of the proposed control approach has been performed in the discrete domain.

In electrolyzers, Faraday’s efficiency is a relevant parameter to assess the amount of hydrogen generated according to the input energy and energy efficiency. Faraday’s efficiency expresses the faradaic losses due to the gas crossover current. The thickness of the membrane and operating conditions (i.e., temperature, gas pressure) may affect the Faraday’s efficiency. The developed models in the literature are mainly focused on alkaline electrolyzers and based on the current and temperature change. However, the modeling of the effect of gas pressure on Faraday’s efficiency remains a major concern. In proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers, the thickness of the used membranes is very thin, enabling decreasing ohmic losses and the membrane to operate at high pressure because of its high mechanical resistance. Nowadays, high-pressure hydrogen production is mandatory to make its storage easier and to avoid the use of an external compressor. However, when increasing the hydrogen pressure, the hydrogen crossover currents rise, particularly at low current densities. Therefore, faradaic losses due to the hydrogen crossover increase. In this article, experiments are performed on a commercial PEM electrolyzer to investigate Faraday’s efficiency based on the current and hydrogen pressure change. The obtained results have allowed modeling the effects of Faraday’s efficiency by a simple empirical model valid for the studied PEM electrolyzer stack. The comparison between the experiments and the model shows very good accuracy in replicating Faraday’s efficiency.