Journal of Power Electronics

The Korean Institute of Power Electronics (전력전자학회)
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High-efficiency bidirectional low-voltage power converter for fuel-cell electric vehicles

  • Woo-Seok Lee (Department of Electrical Engineering, Myongji University) ;
  • Se-Young Bae (Department of Electrical Engineering, Myongji University) ;
  • Dal-Hyeon Cho (Department of Electrical Engineering, Myongji University) ;
  • Hye-Sung Yoon (Hyundai-Rotem) ;
  • Il-Oun Lee (Department of Electrical Engineering, Myongji University)
  • Received : 2023.05.18
  • Accepted : 2023.07.06
  • Published : 2023.09.20
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Abstract

This paper proposes a bidirectional low-voltage DC-to-DC converter for advanced fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). The proposed converter consists of two parallel-operated power converters driving the low-voltage output stage to reduce the size of the filter. Two power converters are internally connected in series with an isolated LLC resonant converter and a non-isolated buck/boost converter to achieve high efficiency in both directions while ensuring very wide input and output voltage ranges. The LLC resonant converter generates an input from a 12 V low-voltage battery to a non-isolated converter when starting an FCEV. Once the fuel-cell stack is activated, the power flow reverses, and the non-isolated buck/boost converter regulates the input voltage for the LLC resonant converter from the power generated in the fuel-cell stack. To validate the performance of the proposed converter, a prototype converter is designed, built, and tested with 2.0 kW in the forward powering mode, 4.5 kW in the reverse powering mode, a 260-430 VDC input, and a 10-15 VDC output. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed converter achieves a power conversion efficiency of over 95.5% in both the forward and reverse powering modes, while ensuring stable bidirectional operation and much lower current and voltage ripples.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2020R1D1A1B07048209).

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