Cost effective saturable inductor for zero voltage switching-zero current switching DC/DC power conditioning converter for fuel cells

Fuel cells produce electricity directly from hydrogen in the form of DC voltage. The fuel cells generators often produce the DC power at relatively low voltage and the voltage depends on the operation conditions; hence, it is necessary to increase and stabilize the output voltage by means of an electronic power converter. The paper deals with a well-known soft switching H bridge DC/DC converter, where the reactive components have a key role; these components must have a minimum impact on the realization complexity: a cost effective realization of the saturable inductor is proposed and. experimentally demonstrated. Furthermore, the efficiency improvements and the possible switching frequency increment are discussed on the basis of the experimental results.

I. Introduction

In the last years and all over the word, a lot of attention has been directed towards the hydrogen as a clean energy carrier. The fuel cells generators can produce electric energy directly from hydrogen and oxygen. The DC voltage generated by fuel cells is generally at low voltage and it is not constant, depending on the operation conditions. For these reasons, quite often, it is necessary to increase and to stabilize the fuel cell stack output voltage by means of an electronic power converter.