Propulsion system architecture and power conditioning topologies for fuel cell vehicles

Efficient Power conversion technologies are strategic to the advancement of fuel cell vehicles. This paper presents an overview of power conditioning system (PCS) architectures for fuel cell vehicles (FCV) propulsion system. Two new power conversion topologies to obtain variable ac from the fuel cell system are proposed. The switching of the power devices are based on the proposed hybrid modulation technique that minimizes the switching losses in the inverter. The proposed converters do not use the dc link filter capacitors. Elimination of dc-link capacitor not only reduces the size and volume, it also helps in retaining the sine wave modulated information at the input of three-phase inverter. Experimental results are presented for the proposed topologies.