Developing a fuel cell/battery converter for electric vehicles

• Main Author: Aung, Si Hein
• Other Authors: Ali Iftekhar Maswood
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/67708
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Energy is one of the most valuable commodities in today’s world. It is needed everywhere and the demand is too big till the limited non-renewable resources like fossil fuels are going to deplete in the near future. Despite being a major source of energy in the world today, fossil fuels are aslo not environment-friendly or eco-friendly. Therefore, there is a need to investigate other sources of energy with little or no environmental impact. Fuel cell energy is one those alternative clean energies. From the understanding of fundamentals and electrical characteristics of a DC motor, fuel cell, DC to DC converter and a battery, the basic design of a standalone system for fuel cell has been propsed in this report. Although there are several ways to connect between battery and fuel cell in a system to drive motor, parallel connection offers more advantages and therefore it is used in the report. Fuel cell’s output voltage is stepped up by the boost converter to match with the battery’s voltage since they are connected in parallel. Another boost converter is again needed to increase the voltage come out from the parallel connection of fuel cell and battery to drive 24V DC motor. PSIM simulation software is used to design and simulate the different components of the system to learn, observe and understand their behaviours.