Solutions for integrating fuel cell systems into electric on-board grid for sustainable mobility applications

The pace towards transportation electrification has been growing exponentially in recent years. One of the biggest challenges in this regard is the energy storage problem where batteries have several shortages like low capacity, reliability problems and rare material needed to fabricate them. Fuel cells, as a promising alternative for batteries, while less efficient, offer longer ranges, heavier payloads, and faster refueling times than batteries. Hence, in order to integrate fuel cell systems into electric on-board grids, proper power electronic solutions are needed to ensure a reliable and efficient operation of the whole system. To this end, multiphase boost converters as the interface between the fuel cell stack and the on-board grid are designed and built with a high power density of above 20 kW/l and light weight, which are crucial requirements for mobile applications. Moreover, the efficiency of the fuel cell is highly entangled with the proper operation of its peripheral components like the necessary air compressor. Therefore, an electric drive inverter using a simple two-level circuit topology is also proposed in this paper to drive the high speed brushless motor of the compressor. Thanks to the implementation of wide band gap semiconductor devices in the proposed designs, the DC boost converters and air compressor drive proposed in this paper can both offer simple circuit structures. This leads to high reliability and enables high power density with considerable low volume and makes them a suitable choice for mobile applications with fuel cells as the power source.