Propulsion and battery charging systems of an all-electric boat fully constructed with interleaved converters employing interphase transformers and Gallium Nitride (GaN) power FET semiconductors

This work presents a Power Electronics solution for an all-electric passenger boat. The proposed system is constructed with building blocks comprising interleaved half-bridge converters employing interphase transformer and Gallium Nitride FET semiconductors. The system employs two multi-level drives and an integrated harbor and onboard PV system. The PV battery charger has two stages. One converter per PV panel and a second based on cascaded buck-boost converters that control the battery current and adapts the voltage levels. The operation, control and design expressions are presented. Finally, experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed system.