In order to reduce the stress on fuel cell based hybrid source fed electric drive system the controller design is made through active current sharing (ACS) technique. The effectiveness of the proposed ACS technique is tested on a dc drive system fed from fuel cell and battery energy sources which enables both load current sharing and source power management. High efficiency and reliability of the hybrid system can be achieved by proper energy conversion and management of power to meet the load demand in terms of required voltage and current. To overcome the slow dynamics feature of FC, a battery bank of adequate power capacity has to be incorporated as FC voltage drops heavily during fast load demand. The controller allows fuel cell to operate in normal load region and draw the excess power from battery. In order to demonstrate the performance of the drive using ACS control strategy different modes of operation of the hybrid source with the static and dynamic behavior of the control system is verified through simulation and experimental results. This control scheme is implemented digitally in LabVIEW with PCI 6251 DAQ I/O interface card. The efficacy of the controller performance is demonstrated in system changing condition supplemented by experimental validation. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.