Research on the Control Method of Staggered Parallel Boost Structure in Fuel Cell System

Fuel cells’ soft output characteristics and mismatched voltage levels with subordinate electrical devices necessitate the use of DC/DC converters, which are an important part of the power electronic subsystem of the fuel cell system. The staggered parallel Boost topology is commonly employed in fuel cell DC/DC converters. This paper focuses on the control characteristics of the two-phase interleaved parallel Boost topology in the context of a fuel cell system. Specifically, we derive the small-signal model and output-control transfer function of the topology, and design a controller based on frequency characteristic analysis. Our proposed controller uses a cascaded double-ring structure and supports both constant current and constant voltage switching modes. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed control strategy, we conduct simulation and prototype testing. The simulation and DC/DC converter prototype are configured according to the output characteristics of the fuel cells, and the experimental results demonstrate the excellent transient and steady-state characteristics of the DC/DC converter under our proposed control strategy.