High-efficiency grid-tied power conditioning system for fuel cell power generation

This paper proposes a grid-tied power conditioning system for the fuel cell power generation, which consists of a 2-stage DC-DC converter and a 3-phase PWM inverter. The 2-stage DC-DC converter boosts the fuel cell stack voltage of 26-48 V up to 400 V, using the hard switching boost converter and the high-frequency unregulated LLC resonant converter. A laboratory experimental set-up was built with the 1.2 kW PEM fuel-cell stack to verify the feasibility of hardware implementation. The developed power conditioning system shows high efficiency of 91%, which is very positive result for the commercialization.