Fuel Cell power system with LLC resonant DC/DC converter

Fuel Cells (FC) are widely investigated for their potential use in electric transportation due of their capability to provide significant amounts of energy with low-noise and with almost zero-emission. FC-based power sources are non-linear system with low voltage and high current capabilities and with efficiency close to 50%. Several researches are in progress, aiming at increasing overall efficiency through optimised combination of components, mainly the FC and the DC/DC converter necessary for its interface with the vehicle DC bus or the recharging station. In this paper, a novel and efficient power system architecture suitable for fuel cell powered vehicles and for recharging stations is proposed. The proposed system includes a fuel cell stack and a LLC resonant DC/DC converter with step-up capability. The latter due its to soft switching operations ensures enhanced efficiency over conventional hard switching counterpart. The proposed system has been modeled in a mixed PSIM-MATLAB/Simulink environment; design criteria and procedures are discussed for further applications and simulation results are shown to validate the proposed solution.