High‑efficiency bidirectional low‑voltage power converter for fuel‑cell electric vehicles

Woo-Seok Lee; Se-Young Bae; Dal-Hyeon Cho; Hye-Sung Yoon; Il-Oun Lee

High‑efficiency bidirectional low‑voltage power converter for fuel‑cell electric vehicles

Vol. 23, No. 9, pp. 1307-1320, Sep. 2023

10.1007/s43236-023-00680-6

Fuel-cell electric vehicle

Bidirectional converter

Power-equalization control

Buck-boost converter

LLC resonant converter

Abstract

This paper proposes a bidirectional low-voltage DC-to-DC converter for advanced fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). The proposed converter consists of two parallel-operated power converters driving the low-voltage output stage to reduce the size of the filter. Two power converters are internally connected in series with an isolated LLC resonant converter and a non-isolated buck/boost converter to achieve high efficiency in both directions while ensuring very wide input and output voltage ranges. The LLC resonant converter generates an input from a 12 V low-voltage battery to a non-isolated converter when starting an FCEV. Once the fuel-cell stack is activated, the power flow reverses, and the non-isolated buck/boost converter regulates the input voltage for the LLC resonant converter from the power generated in the fuel-cell stack. To validate the performance of the proposed converter, a prototype converter is designed, built, and tested with 2.0 kW in the forward powering mode, 4.5 kW in the reverse powering mode, a 260–430 VDC input, and a 10–15 VDC output. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed converter achieves a power conversion efficiency of over 95.5% in both the forward and reverse powering modes, while ensuring stable bidirectional operation and much lower current and voltage ripples.

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Cite this article

[IEEE Style]

W. Lee, S. Bae, D. Cho, H. Yoon, I. Lee, "High‑efficiency bidirectional low‑voltage power converter for fuel‑cell electric vehicles," Journal of Power Electronics, vol. 23, no. 9, pp. 1307-1320, 2023. DOI: 10.1007/s43236-023-00680-6.

[ACM Style]

Woo-Seok Lee, Se-Young Bae, Dal-Hyeon Cho, Hye-Sung Yoon, and Il-Oun Lee. 2023. High‑efficiency bidirectional low‑voltage power converter for fuel‑cell electric vehicles. Journal of Power Electronics, 23, 9, (2023), 1307-1320. DOI: 10.1007/s43236-023-00680-6.