A novel multiphase DC/DC boost converter for interaction of solar energy and hydrogen fuel cell in hybrid electric vehicles

With the rapid development of new energy vehicles, designing an excellent DC/DC converter to realize the efficient interaction of hydrogen and solar energy is crucial for the power regulation of hybrid electric vehicles driven by both solar energy and hydrogen fuel cells. In this paper, a high-performance multiphase DC/DC boost converter which can be shared by the solar generation system and hydrogen fuel cell in a hybrid vehicle is proposed to achieve light weight, low input current ripple, fast response, minimal power loss, high compactness and high redundancy. It is equipped with a novel high power density active snubber cell that realizes softswitching of all semiconductor devices, and itself is also characterized by N-phase expansion, the low voltage and current stresses and the short operation time in each switching period. Thus, choosing low voltage and current rated components to achieve high efficiency, high power density and low cost is feasible. Operating principle, design procedure, control strategy and power loss analysis of the proposed converter are given in detail. The performance is evaluated on a 2-phase DC/DC boost converter prototype. The peak conversion efficiency reaches 98.8 % and the experimental results agreed well with the theoretical predictions.