Grid-tied power conditioning system for fuel cell power generation

This paper proposes a grid-tied power conditioning system for the fuel cell, which consists of a three-phase current-fed dc-dc converter and a 3-phase inverter. The three-phase current-fed dc-dc converter boosts the fuel cell voltage of 26-48V up to 400V, using the zero voltage switching and three-phase DC power transfer capability. The operation of proposed power conditioning system was verified through simulations with PSCAD/EMTDC software. The feasibility of hardware implementation was verified through experimental works with a laboratory prototype, which was built with 1.2kW PEM fuel-cell stack, 1kW current-fed converter, and 2kW PWM inverter. The proposed system can be utilized to commercialize a real interconnection system for the fuel-cell power generation.