Design & Control of Fuel-Cell DC-DC Converter for Hybrid Power System of the UAV

This paper proposes a design and control strategy for the development of fuel-cell DC-DC converter (FDC) applied to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with hybrid power systems. The proposed converter has various operation modes depending on the flight scenario of the UAV. It operates in battery charging mode during takeoff and supplies power to the ESC driving the pusher motor during cruise. The FDC supplies the DC voltage exceeding 100V from the fuel cell stack with the required voltage DC 100V. The FDC consists of four buck converter circuits, each of the four buck converters is controlled through a single DSP. In addition, functions such as mode change, converter operation, and status monitoring were implemented through CAN communication so that they can be used as hardware for UAV’s energy management unit (EMU) in the future. The validity of the function implementation was confirmed through output experiments and waveform observations.