Intelligent Control of a New High Voltage Gain Interleaved DC-DC Converter for Fuel Cell Applications

As important elements of the hydrogen economy, fuel cells (FCs) require high step-up DC-DC converters. To this end, a new high voltage gain interleaved DC-DC converter benefiting from expandable quadratic-boost and switched-capacitor networks is proposed in this paper. A switching model shows that the proposed converter reaches a voltage gain of about 10, semiconductor voltage stresses are half of the output voltage or less, and current stresses are cut in half when compared to the non-interleaved version. Besides, according to a dynamic simulation study, the newly proposed single-input fuzzy-logic controller-based control method allows less than half the settling time and 5% less voltage overshoot than the current mode control; moreover, it attains a perfect current sharing while voltage mode control fails by having a current unbalance factor of up to 0.33. Finally, an average model demonstrates the accomplished operation of the offered system under an office block power demand.