Investigation of power converter topologies for solar powered hydrogen reformer

Hydrogen offers higher energy density than conventional hydrocarbon based fossil fuels, and yields zero emission through various thermal and electro-chemical process. Therefore, hydrogen is considered as an attractive fuel candidate for the future energy systems. Hydrogen can be harvested from water or hydrocarbon molecules through different reforming process. Among a variety of fuel candidates, ethanol fuel can yield high hydrogen energy output per electric energy input. In this paper, solar power is harvested from the environment, and is used to supply an ethanol fueled hydrogen reformer; with the target in achieving high electric potential field to generate cold plasma, different power converter topologies are investigated and evaluated with experimental iterations; the prototypes of the topologies under study are built and experimentally verified in order to further achieve simple engineering and effectiveness in cold plasma generation; eventually the flyback topology is chosen for the reformer and satisfactory results are collected.