Rapidly rising fossil fuel costs along with increased environmental awareness has
encouraged the development of alternative energy sources. Such sources include fuel
cells, wind, solar and ocean tide power. Among them, fuel cells have received increased
interest in the recent years. This is mainly due to their high efficiency, modularity, and
simple construction. However, due to their low output voltage and wide variation from
no load to full load, a power electronics converter is required to interface the fuel cell
with its loads.
This dissertation focuses on developing a set of considerations that will assist
designers of the power electronics converter in the design and optimization of the
system. These design considerations are obtained analytically and verified
experimentally and allow obtaining an efficient and stable fuel cell – power converter
system.
In addition to the design guidelines this dissertation presents new power converter
topologies that do not require the use of transformers to achieve a large voltage gain. Further a new modular fuel cell power converter system that divides the fuel cell
stack to optimize power generation is proposed. It is shown by means of mathematical
analysis and experimental prototypes that the proposed solutions contribute to the
reduction of size and cost of the power converter as well to increase the efficiency of the
system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1106 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Palma Fanjul, Leonardo Manuel |
| Contributors | Enjeti, Prasad |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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