Comparison between two-stage and integrated power conditioner architecture for fuel cell based power supply system

Commonly, a fuel cell (FC) based power conditioner (PC) includes several conversion stages like dc-dc converter, dc-ac inverter, among others. In order to contribute in actual power conditioning, two suitable power conditioner architectures to work with fuel cell technology are proposed. The first one is a conventional two-stage architecture which consists of an active clamp full-bridge boost converter (ACFBC) for dc-dc stage and a full-bridge sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) inverter for dc-ac stage. The second one combines the ACFBC structure with the SPWM technique into an integrated architecture which converts directly the dc output voltage from the fuel cell into a sinusoidal ac voltage reducing the total components number. In order to verify the feasibility of both architectures, simulation and experimental results are compared. The fuel cell based power conditioner is intended for stand-alone power generation with 120 Vac output voltage (sinusoidal single phase) and low voltage input (26 Vdc).