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Abstract. Fossil-fuel pollutants being pumped from internal combustion engine vehicles have a major threat
to our climate and our health. Electric vehicles have been proposed as alternatives to conventional vehicles and
are considered as one of the pillar of eco-friendly solutions to overcome the problem of global pollution and
radiations due to greenhouse gases. Generally fuel cells are low-voltage high-current sources and their output
voltages are sensitive to changes in the loads, therefore integrating them with the high voltage of the DC-link of
electric vehicles’ traction drives represents a major challenge for vehicle designers. Boost DC/DC converters
are commonly used to interface the elements in the electric power-train, hence the objective of this paper is to
design an appropriate boost DC/DC converter structure to manage the energy transfer from the fuel cell stack
to the DC-bus based on high efficiency range. A multi-phase interleaved boost DC/DC converter structure is
proposed, which offers reduction of: input current ripples, voltage stresses on switches, output voltage ripples,
and passive component sizes. Improving transient response and reliability are among the many advantages of
using such converters.
Keywords: Brushless DC motor, interleaved boost converter, fuel cell, electric vehicle
1 Introduction
Air pollution and greenhouse gases emissions are of serious concern in densely populated urban areas.
Transport sector represents the main source of carbon dioxide emissions due to fossil fuel consumption world-
wide and consequently is estimated to be responsible for around 1.3 million deaths every year. Due to environ-
mental awareness, rapid consumption of natural resources, and increasing of fuel price, there is a great demand
to search for green transportation alternatives which are independent on fossil fuel.
Electric vehicles have been proposed as alternatives to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and
are considered as one of the pillar of eco-friendly solutions to overcome the problem of global pollution and
radiations due to greenhouse gases. In general, an electric vehicle propulsion system consists of an electric
energy supply system and a traction system; interconnected to each other through a high voltage DC-link.
Traction system constitutes the electric motor and its drive system. Among various electric motors, Brush-
less Direct Current (BLDC) motor appears to be the most suitable motor for electric vehicles due to its higher
reliability, higher power density, higher efficiency, lower maintenance requirements, lower cost and lower
weight[3] .
Supply system was conventionally consisted of a pack of batteries as energy source due to their advantages,
such as: high power density, fast dynamic response time to fluctuations in a load, energy recovery during braking
operation, and nearly zero emission. Unfortunately, batteries have some constraints that limit the pure battery
driven vehicles, such as: low energy density, long charging time, high cost, maintenance needs and limited
lifetime. Nowadays, researches are focused on renewable energy sources because they have higher power and
∗
Corresponding author. E-mail address: ammyk.khater@mtc.edu.eg.
energy densities, lower cost, longer lifetime, non-carbon emission, lower acoustic and heat emissions, more
efficient power, and are maintenance free compared to the batteries. Among these renewable electric energy
sources is the fuel cell.
Fuel cells have some disadvantages, such as: sensitive to sudden changes in the loads, slow dynamic
response time and relatively long warming up time before full power output is available [14] . To exploit the
advantages of both fuel cells and batteries and undermines their disadvantages, this paper proposed a hybrid
power supply system based on a combination of two energy sources.
Fuel cells are low-voltage current sources, therefore for automotive high-power applications, there is a
need for DC/DC step-up or boost converters to be connected between the fuel cells to the motor drive DC-link.
Using conventional boost converters for such high-power applications leads not only to high input cur-
rent ripples which reduce the fuel cell stack lifetime, but also to electrical/thermal stresses on the switching
devices which decrease the overall converter’s reliability. A solution to this problem is considered in this paper;
by designing a multiphase interleaved boost converter for fuel cell/battery powered electric vehicle (FCBEV)
applications.
The paper is organized in six sections: Section 2 describes briefly the components of the FCBEV. Section
3 explains the principle of operation of the traction system components. The operational characteristics and the
mathematical modeling of the fuel cell are detailed in Section 4. Section 5 explains the design of the multiphase
interleaved boost converter and its simulation results. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief summary in
Section 6.
2 System description
The basic configuration of the FCBEV is shown in Fig. 1. Its traction system constitutes a BLDC motor,
and its associated voltage source inverter and drive system. The power supply system is composed of a fuel cell
stack as a main source, and a battery pack as an auxiliary source to power the propulsion motor during starting
the vehicle and to assist the propulsion of the vehicle during transients. The fuel cell stack is connected to the
DC-bus through a boost converter, whereas the battery pack is connected to the DC-bus via a bidirectional
DC/DC converter. Original 12 V accessories, such as: lights, horn, and so on are powered by tapping the full
battery pack voltage and cuts it down to a regulated 12 V output using a buck DC/DC converter.
It is obvious that the performance of the electric vehicle supply system is limited considerably by the
performances of the converters. This paper is one of a series of papers by the author on the modeling and
simulation of the overall FCBEV configuration components. It carries out the design and simulation of an
interleaved boost DC/DC converter that interfaces the fuel cell with the power-train of the electric vehicle.
According to the Dynamic Test data provided by the manufacturer for the HP M 5000−B BLDC motor[2] ,
the motor torque constant can be estimated by taking the slope of the line fitted to the data points as shown in
Fig. 6. The calculated torque constant is 0.168 [N.m/A].
Usually BLDC motor drive system controllers include both a speed controller and a current controller to
control the motor performances. Simulink model of the traction system is shown in Fig. 7, where a cascaded
Fig. 4: Back-EMF, Hall position sensors and phase Fig. 5: HPM5000B BLDC motor
current
speed control scheme consisting of an inner current control loop and an outer speed control loop is employed.
The whole design and analysis of BLDC motor drive system controllers are carried out in a variety of references
(see for example [6]).
The supply system is composed of a fuel cell stack as the main power source and batteries as the auxiliary
power source to power the propulsion motor during starting the vehicle and to assist the propulsion of the
vehicle during transients. Since this paper is concerned with the designing and modeling of the boost converter
which interfaces the fuel cell stack to the DC bus, therefore only the fuel cell operational characteristics and
mathematical modeling are presented.
A fuel cell is an electro-chemical device that converts chemical energy into electrical energy and heat as a
byproduct. The fuel cell will continue delivering electric power as long as fuel is supplied. The most commonly
used fuels are hydrogen and oxygen. Among fuel cells available today are: proton exchange membrane fuel
cells, alkaline fuel cells, phosphoric acid fuel cells, solid oxide fuel cells, and molten carbonate fuel cells[8] .
In this paper, Polymer Electrolyte Membrane or Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are used
because of their comparatively high efficiency, high energy density, low working temperature (30 − 100o C),
compactness, easy and safe operational modes[9] .
A PEMFC consists of a solid polymer electrolyte membrane sandwiched between two electrodes; anode
and cathode, as shown in Fig.8. When the hydrogen is injected at the anode and enters the electrolyte, it ionizes:
Anode:
Only protons are allowed to pass through the electrolyte, therefore the protons move across the electrolyte
to the cathode to rejoin with oxygen, while the freed electrons from the hydrogen atoms travel through an
external circuit to recombine with oxygen at the cathode.
Cathode:
i.e., hydrogen gas is recombined with oxygen gas producing electricity with water vapor as emission. A
closed loop system could be operated whereby the water from of the PEMFC can be electrolyzed into oxygen
and hydrogen for later re-use. Oxygen is generally obtained from the surrounding air.
Generally fuel cells are low-voltage high-current sources. A single cell produces a voltage of approxi-
mately 1 V. To produce a higher voltage, multiple cells have to be connected in series to build a fuel cell
stack.The relationship between output voltage (V ) and load current (i) is given as:
RT i 1
V = Ncell En − ln . − r. i (4)
zαF i0 s Td + 1
Fig. 9 shows the used 6 kW, 45V PEMFC stack. Its parameters are given in Tab. 3. The polarization
current-voltage (I-V) and current-power (I-P) curves are shown in Fig. 10.
Fuel cell stacking reduces its reliability and lifetime as a chain of series-connected cells is as strong as the
weakest cell. Also fuel cell stack voltage is sensitive to sudden changes in the loads. Therefore, stepping-up the
fuel cell stack voltage level is needed to interface the fuel cell stack with the high power train DC-link voltage;
72V. This is achieved by using a boost DC/DC converter.
A boost DC/DC converter is a stepping-up converter that transfers power from a lower DC voltage bus
to a higher DC voltage bus. A DC/DC converter block mainly utilizes power semiconductor switch, a diode,
an inductor, and is often accompanied by an output filter capacitor. The most important requirements expected
from a boost DC/DC converter are high voltage ratio and low input current ripple, which are associated with
volume, weight, reliability, and efficiency constraints[7] .
When a conventional boost converter is used for high-power applications; like electric vehicles, the low-
input-voltage causes large input current to be withdrawn. Also with low duty cycle operation, the ripple cur-
rent through the boost diode and output capacitor becomes very high. These increase the losses enormously
and make the conventional boost converter quite inefficient[12] .Large duty ratio places a practical limit on the
achievable voltage step-up due to the large volume and weight of the required capacitance[13] . Hence conven-
tional DC/DC boost converter only steps-up the voltage, without taking into consideration the input current,
output voltage ripple and passive component size.
The requirements expected from a boost DC/DC converter are achieved when an interleaved design in-
volving parallel operation of multiple boost converters is used. Fig. 11 shows Simulink model of the designed
two-phase interleaved boost DC/DC converter. The gating pulses of the MOSFETS; Q1 and Q2, are shifted
by 360◦ /2 = 180◦ according to the timing diagram shown in Fig. 12 with four sub-intervals. The converter
principle of operation can be summarized as follows:
The interleaved-boost approach uses forced current-sharing between the power stages to equalize the
power that the stages deliver. Therefore both the inductors and diodes should be identical in both channels
of an interleaved design, i.e.; each inductor will have the same inductance value; L1 = L2 = L. It is assumed
that the duty cycle of Q1 and Q2; denoted as D1 and D2, are the same, i.e.; D1 = D2 = D.
Interval 1 (t0 − t1 ): Q1 is on and Q2 is off, D2 is conducting and D1 is reverse biased, current ramps
up in L1 with a slope ddiL1 Vin
t = L , storing energy in L1, while L2 discharges through the load with a slope
d iL2 Vin − Vo
dt = L .
Interval 2 (t1 − t2 ): Q1 and Q2 are off, D1 and D2 are conducting. Currents in L1 and L2 ramp down
Vin − Vo
delivering part of their stored energy to the load and the output capacitor with slopes ddiL1 d iL2
t = dt = L .
Interval 3 (t2 − t3 ): Q2 is on and Q1 is still off, D1 is conducting and D2 is reverse biased, current
ramps up in L2 with a slope ddiL2 Vin
t = L , storing energy in L2, while L1 continues to discharge with a slope
d iL1 Vin − Vo
dt = L .
Interval 4 (t3 − t0 ): Q1 and Q2 are off, D1 and D2 are conducting. Hence the circuit behaves the same as
in interval 2.
The design of interleaved boost converter involves the selection of the inductors, the output capacitor,
the power switches and the output diodes. The boost converter can be classified into continuous current mode
(CCM) or discontinuous current mode (DCM). Most modern designs use CCM because higher power densities
are possible [5] , hence this design is based on CCM in which the inductor current remains positive at all times.
For details on DCM operation, refer to [10]. Designing the interleaved boost converter in CCM is similar to the
design of the conventional single stage boost converter with slight differences.
From Tabs. 2 and 3, the design parameters are as follows:
Input voltage Vin range : 32 : 60 Vrms ;
Output voltage Vo : 72 V;
Output power Po : 5 KW;
Switching frequency Fs : 20 KHz;
Current ripple ∆Io : 40% of load current;
Voltage ripple ∆Vo : 200 mV.
The equations below are used for the calculation of the converter parameters: From the maximum and
minimum input voltages, and the output voltage, the maximum and minimum duty cycles are calculated.
Vo 1
= (5)
Vin 1−D
Vo − Vin
∴ D= (6)
Vo
Vo − Vinmin Vo − Vinmax
⇒ Dmax = & Dmin = . (7)
Vo Vo
From the output power and voltage, the load current Io is calculated:
Po
Io = . (8)
Vo
Output current ripple ∆ Io = 40% of load current Io .
The converter input current Iin ; which is the output current of the fuel cell stack, can be calculated from
the load current Io and duty cycle.
Io
Iin = . (9)
1−D
The inductor current per phase is one-half the converter input current Iin :
0.5 Io
∴ IL (avg) = . (11)
1 − Dmax
The peak-to-peak inductor current ripple per phase; ∆IL , is assumed to be a 20% of the individual phase
current.
∆ IL = 20 % IL . (12)
The inductance value per phase is then calculated using the ripple current, switching frequency, input
voltage, and duty cycle information.
R Dmax (1 − Dmax )2
∴ LCritical = , (17)
2 Fs
where
Vo
R = . (18)
Io
Finally the output capacitor value C can be calculated by:
Io Dmax
C = . (19)
∆ Vo . (2Fs )
In Eq. (19), Fs is doubled because both phases are combined at the output capacitor.
According to the above equations, the chosen boost converter parameters are: the duty cycle D is 0.4,
the inductance value per phase; L1 = L2, is 400µH, and the capacitor value C is 1200µF . A resistive and
inductive load of 1Ω and 100µH are used to simulate motor windings across the power terminals.
The simulation waveforms of PWM signals, inductor currents, converter input current, and converter out-
put voltage and current are shown in Figs. 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17.
Fig. 13 shows the gating pulses of Mosfets for a duty cycle D of 0.4. Fig. 14 shows that both the inductor
currents IL1 and IL2 remain positive at all times hence the converter is in CCM, and that they are phase-shifted
by 180◦ ; that is while one is charging, the other is discharging. The inductor current ripple is 1.85 A. The
average value of each of the inductor currents is 60.2 A; that is half of the input current shown in Fig. 15. The
ripple of the input current is 0.62 A; which means that it is reduced as compared to the inductor currents, and
proves the natural cancellation of the ripple in the interleaved topology. Fig. 16 shows that the output voltage
ripple ∆Vo is less that 200 mV which meets the design specifications. From Figs. 16 and 17, the waveforms
of the converter output voltage and current are the same which indicates that the power factor of the circuit is
approximately unity, hence this circuit can be used when power factor correction is needed.
From the above design and simulation, it can be deduced that in a typical interleaved converter;where
several power stages are connected in parallel and driven with signals shifted by 360◦ /(number of phases), the
effective switching frequency is increased as several times as the number of the interleaved modules without
compromising the efficiency, and that interleaving topology offers numerous important benefits such as:
• High power-density.
• Reduction of input current and output filter capacitor current due to a ripple cancellation effect.
• Size reduction of magnetic components by processing power in a number of power conversion stages that
are connected in parallel.
• Reduction of the burden on the output capacitor.
• Reliability improvement.
• Higher efficiency by splitting the output current into two paths, substantially reducing I 2 R losses.
• Running the capacitors closer to their optimum due to the increased of effective switching frequency.
• Longer fuel cell lifetime due to lowering the current ripple.
6 Conclusions
Fuel cell electric vehicles are considered as one of the pillar of eco-friendly solutions to overcome the prob-
lem of global pollution and radiations due to greenhouse gases. Since fuel cells are low-voltage high-current
sources and their output voltages are sensitive to changes in the loads, a high power DC/DC converter is needed
to adjust the output voltage, current and power of fuel cells to meet the vehicle requirements. In this paper,
a two-phase interleaved boost converter is designed, the selection criterion of its elements is explained, and
benefits of using interleaving topology are discussed. Simulation results verified the capability of the designed
converter to achieve the requirements on input current, output voltage ripple and passive component size.
References