Efficient soft-switched boost converter for fuel cell applications

The dc voltage generated from fuel cell is low in magnitude, unregulated and load dependent. Hence, it is required to be regulated and boosted by high performance dc-dc converter. In this paper, a fully soft-switched pulse-width-modulated dc-dc boost converter has been proposed for fuel cell applications. The proposed converter operates at high switching frequency with high efficiency and large power to volume ratio. A laboratory prototype model of the proposed converter has been designed and fabricated for charging a battery bank at 110 V from a fuel cell stack SR-12 of Avista Lab. The experimental results were found in close agreement with the predicted behavior.