Comparison of two soft switching DC-DC converters for fuel cell applications

This paper is going to develop two soft switching DC-DC C isolated converters for the design of the power electronic interface for fuel cell applications. One is based on the half - bridge capacitive converter and operates in ZVS mode. Another, in ZCS mode, is issued from the half-bridge inductive converter. Each structure has its own advantages and drawbacks. The ZVS converter can, actually, overcome the drawbacks of the original structure but is more complicated. As for the ZCS converter, the duty cycle is limited greater than 0.5 but more simple and suitable for the fuel cell applications thanks to the inductive feature of the input. Operation principle, characteristics and components sizing and losses estimation of each converter show that both of these structures allow optimizing the choice of components. Finally, experimental results on 2.5kW converter are going to validate prediction results.