A ΓZ-source based hybrid power converter for battery-fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle

Low cost and high reliability are the main issues considered in power converter design for hybrid electric vehicle. In this paper, a hybrid power converter is proposed for the power flow control of the battery-fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle. The converter consists of a unidirectional Γ Z-source converter and a bidirectional DC-DC converter. By controlling the voltage of the Z source capacitor and the modulation index of the inverter, the power flow between the fuel cell, battery and the load can be controlled flexibly. The different operation modes of the system and the power flow control strategies are analysed. To verify the validity of the proposed power converter topology and the control methods, system simulation model is developed in Matlab/Simulink environment. In addition, the simulation model is also implemented in the RT-LAB real-time simulator. The simulation results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed methods.