Fuel cells are new alternative energy resource that has a great promise for distributed generation and electric vehicle application. However, fuel cells have a slow response due to their slow internal electromechanical and thermodynamic response. To optimize the fuel cell system performance, a fuel cell DC-DC converter with an appropriate controller which can regulate the power flow and automat...

The goal of this work is to reduce the DC-link capacitance of a two-stage single-phase inverter so much that the use of film capacitors becomes feasible in both, price and volume. Film capacitors instead of electrolytic capacitors could increase lifetime and reliability of the inverter, especially in high-temperature applications like module-integrated micro-inverters. For the capacitance reduc...

A novel bidirectional DC-DC converter is presented in this paper. The circuit configuration of the proposed converter is very simple. The proposed converter employs a coupled inductor with same winding turns in the primary and secondary sides. In step-up mode, the primary and secondary windings of the coupled inductor are operated in parallel-charge and series-discharge to achieve high step-up ...

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY: Received 15 September 2012 Revised 15 August 2013 Accepted 22 August 2013 This paper presents a novel control method to improve the efficiency of low-voltage DC-DC converters at light loads. Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) converters have poor efficiencies at light loads, while pulse frequency modulation (PFM) control is more efficient for the same cases. Swi...

Sensors with long lifetimes create new applications in medical, infrastructure and environmental monitoring. Due to volume constraints, sensor systems are often capable of storing only small amounts of energy. Several systems have increased lifetime through VDD scaling [1][2][3]. This necessitates voltage conversion from highervoltage storage elements, such as batteries and fuel cells. Power is...

This paper proposes a multi-stage power generation system suitable for renewable energy sources, which is composed of a DC-DC power converter and a three-phase inverter. The DC-DC power converter is a boost converter to convert the output voltage of the DC source into two voltage sources. The DC-DC converter has two switches operates like a continuous conduction mode. The input current of DC-DC...