Design and control of a novel power electronics interface for fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle applications

Power Electronics Interfaces (PEIs) play an increasingly important role in the future automotive technology. This paper proposes a novel power electronics interface (PEI) to interface multiple energy sources such as Fuel Cells (FC), Batteries and Supercapacitors to the powertrain of fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles (FCHEV). The proposed PEI is responsible for the power-flow management on-board the vehicle for each operating mode. In this research, a Multi-Device Interleaved Multiple-Input Converter (MDI-MIC) is proposed to reduce the input/output ripples and to reduce the size of passive components with high efficiency. In addition, low electromagnetic interference (EMI) and low stress in the switches are expected. Moreover, a small-signal model of the PEI is derived to design the appropriate controllers. The proposed power electronics interface (PEI) and its controller are designed and analyzed by using Matlab/Simulink. The analytical and simulation results related to this research are presented and discussed.