High-efficiency fuel-cell power inverter with soft-switching resonant technique

In order to reduce the capital and overall operating cost of a fuel-cell system, a high-efficiency fuel-cell power inverter with a simple framework is required. The high-order two-inductance two-capacitance (LLCC) resonant technique is adopted in this study to implement a low-frequency 60-Hz sinewave voltage inverter utilized in the proton exchange membrane fuel-cell (PEMFC) system. The methodology for inverting dc voltage into low-frequency ac voltage is usually generated by the pulse-width-modulation (PWM) technique. However, the PWM-type inverter output has high-frequency harmonic components. Although an adequately designed filter could be utilized to overcome this problem, there are still some undesirable effects introduced by the high-frequency switching loss, electromagnetic-interference, harmonic current, and load variation. A novel power inverter via the LLCC resonant technique is designed for inverting dc voltage into 60-Hz ac sinewave voltage in the PEMFC system. This circuit scheme has the merits of low harmonic components, soft switching, high efficiency, and simplified implementation. The effectiveness of the proposed resonant inverter used for the PEMFC system is verified by numerical simulations and experimental results.