The high cost of fuel cells is the main reason to think of an alternative such as a fuel cell emulator. The emulator must be able to reproduce the nonlinear output voltage-current characteristic fuel cell (FC). This paper then proposes a possible solution for emulating a PEMFC system using a dc/dc buck converter. The converter-based system allows the behavior of fuel cell to be easily emulated and can be used in laboratory as a low-cost system for design and experimental purposes. The structure of the interleaved boost has been applied in view of the advantages such as the reduction of the current ripple delivered by the PEMFC and the reduction of the stresses on the semiconductors since each converter carries 1 / N of the current delivered by the PEMFC. Also, in this paper a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) is used to regulate the output voltage of the interleaved boost dcdc converter. The performance of this controller has been tested under different disturbances using the MATLAB / Simulink simulation package. Simulation results show that the proposed control strategy offers good performances versus load variation, and reference voltage variation.

Keywords: Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), Emulator, Fuzzy logic control, Linear quadratic regulator (LQR), Dc-dc converter, Interleaved boost