1kW fuel cell power conditioner suited for renewable stand-alone power supply systems

Normally fuel cell based power supply system needs a power conditioner to convert the low DC output voltage generated by the fuel cell into usable AC voltage for any practical application. For proper power conditioning design fuel cell electrical characteristics as well as customer requirements must be taken into account. Therefore, in this paper, a practical design methodology for two-stage power conditioner architecture suited for using in stand-alone power generation systems with 120VAC output voltage (sinusoidal single-phase) and low input voltage (26VDC) is presented. Proposed power conditioner architecture, which consists of an active clamp full-bridge boost converter (ACFBC) for the DC-DC stage and a full-bridge sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) inverter for DC-AC stage is designed, simulated and implemented. In order to validate proposed power conditioner architecture, experimental results for 1kW power conditioner prototype are presented.