Novel power conditioning system for residential fuel cell power plants

This paper describes a novel power conditioning system for residential fuel cell power plants, consisting of a step-up DC/DC converter and a single or a multiphase inverter. To increase the efficiency of the whole system a quasi Z-source inverter along with a step-up isolation transformer and a voltage doubler rectifier can be used. Due the continuous input current and low current ripple, the service life of a fuel cell is significantly increased. Further reduction in the output current ripple of a fuel cell is achieved by implementing an interleaved converter design with shifted switching and active ripple cancellation. Interleaved converter design also enables variations in the operating cell count to increase the overall efficiency of a power conditioning system.