Implementation and dual loop control of two phases interleaved boost converter for fuel cell applications

A fuel cell is usually a low-voltage with hybrid voltage/current source characteristics. So that their output voltage must be increased to approximately a few hundred volts to be suitable for vehicles power trains or for any industrial application. Therefore a dc-dc power converter is required to set up the fuel cell voltage to high voltage DC bus. In this paper, analysis, implementation and control of a dc-dc converter structure called two phases interleaved Boost converter (IBC) will be presented. This topology is widely used to reduce the input current ripples and reduce the size of passive component with high efficiency for fuel cell applications. The control of the IBC converter is designed by dual loop control that contains a voltage loop with a linear PI controller and a fast current loop with a non-linear sliding controller to ensure excellent performance results. The control loop has been validated by experimental results using small-scale test bench with dSPACE-1104 card.