Backstepping Supertwisting Control of Four-Phase Interleaved Boost Converter for PEM Fuel Cell

This article proposes a novel and robust nonlinear controller for a four-phase interleaved boost converter combined with proton exchange membrane fuel cells. The proposed controller has an inner loop based on a backstepping algorithm, which would transfer the state function of the system to the differential equation of the error variable by using a recursive procedure. The reference current is generated by a supertwisting sliding mode (STSM) algorithm in the outer loop; the sliding surface is defined by the error between the output voltage and reference voltage. The strong robustness and highly dynamic feature of the proposed controller are shown by the performance of the output voltage, source current, and settling time. Besides, the parameters of the proposed controller are tuned and then well optimized using a particle swarm optimization algorithm, and their effectiveness is verified by considering the uncertainty of different operation statuses and the deviations of circuit components. Furthermore, a double-loop STSM controller is chosen for comparison and discussion. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is further evaluated through experimental results obtained with a 500 W fuel cell system based on a real-time hardware-in-the-loop system.