High Gain Boost Converter with Reduced Voltage in Capacitors for Fuel-Cells Energy Generation Systems

Abstract

This work presents a power-electronics based system for renewable energy applications, the system is driven with an only one switch quadratic type boost converter, the discussed converter is based on a stack of switching stages which provide a large voltage gain, a desirable feature for fuel cell generation systems, the converters gain function is the quadratic boost-type converters; furthermore, the topology can be extended. The major benefit of the topology is that there is not a capacitor that sustains the entire output voltage, in contrast to other similar topologies in which there is a capacitor rated to the output port voltage, there is no high voltage capacitor in this system. Experimental verification is presented to confirm the system principles; experiments included a fuel cell emulator that was built and used for the experiments.