Development of Serial-Connected High Step-Up DC-DC Converter with Single Switch

In this paper, a novel high step-up DC-DC converter has been designed for fuel cell applications. The proposed high step-up converter can be used for various portable energy storage components such as fuel cells which are used for hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), and light electric vehicles (LEV).The proposed converter is integrated by boost circuit, voltage lift capacitor, and coupled-inductor techniques to achieve high step-up voltage and has several advantages. First, the circuit is controlled by one single pulse width modulation (PWM). Second, the converter consists of active clamp circuit to recycle the leakage inductance and send to output capacitor so that the voltage spike on active switch is suppressed and efficiency is also improved. Third, by using the winding of secondary boost circuit, and voltage lift capacitor techniques, the high voltage gain can be achieved without more than 50% duty ratio, and the slope compensation circuit can also be simplified.Finally, a 1k W prototype converter is implemented, to verify the performance of the proposed converter with input voltage 48V, output voltage 400V, and output power 1k W is also achieved. The highest efficiency is 92.96% at 400W, and the full-load efficiency is up to 90.48%.