Improved Voltage Gain L-Impedance Hybrid Quadratic Boost Cuk DC-DC Converter(L-HQBC) for Fuel Cell Application

Fuel cells (FC) or energy storage devices such as Super capacitor or battery have recently drawn increasing attention for their eco-friendly nature with less carbon dioxide emissions. With the intention of lowering greenhouse gas emissions fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) are being developed for automobiles, buses, trucks and even trains. DC-DC converter being a crucial part of FCEVs which improves the low and unregulated FC voltage to the appropriate level of DC-link voltage as per EVs requirement and thus regulating the power flow. The FCEVs require a wide range of DC gain voltage. Hence to raise and improve the comparatively lesser voltage level of fuel cells with DC links a wider voltage gain DC-DC converters are typically required. Here, the L-impedance hybrid quadratic boost Cuk converter (L-HQBC) has been proposed with high voltage gain as compared to HQBC. This proposed L-HQBC employs quadratic Boost-Cuk converter (Type II) including L-impedance network which results in the hybridization in quadratic boost Cuk converter. The Quadratic boost-Cuk converter is known for stepping up the voltage to a level of high gain and the merged L-impedance enhances the voltage gain even further. The proposed L-HQBC has been designed for 400 W and validated using MATLAB/Simulink platform. The proposed L-HQBC has been compared with the conventional Quadratic boost converter (QBC) and Hybrid Quadratic Boost-Cuk converter(HQBC). The L-HQBC gain is 25 % more than HQBC.