Experimental Evaluation of Power Switch Fault-Tolerant Control of a six phase Mirror Interleaved Boost Converter for Fuel Cell Applications

Abstract

In recent years, Fuel Cell has been designated by public and private researchers as the ideal candidate for many applications (industrial, commercial, transport, aerospace, and military applications) with high autonomy and zero emission of pollutants (gas, noise). In such critical applications, a high level of reliability is required. Power converters play a vital role in maintaining normal operation for all types of electrified transport, including fuel cell electric vehicles. Therefore, the reliability of the converters is crucial, since a fault in these circuits could cause a failure or malfunction on the entire power train if no fault-tolerant strategy was applied. In Fuel Cell Systems (FCS), DC/DC converters are one of the most important failure sources. Since they consist mainly of several power switches that can fail at any time. Faults in these DC/DC converters are classified as short circuit faults (SCF), open circuit faults (OCF), and degradation faults. In this paper we focus mainly on (OCF) in six phase Mirror Interleaved DC/DC Boost Converter (MIBC) used in (FCS), even (SCF) can be considered by putting a fuse in series with the power switch that will be merged when the current increases in the branch and the fault will be reduced to an (OCF). Two fault tolerance techniques will be used; one is symmetrical, which serves to keep the symmetry of the structure and another asymmetric. The objective of both techniques is to limit the ripples of the current delivered by the fuel cell and keep its good performance. Both techniques will be compared by simulation results and experimental validations.

Authors

1. 1Polytechnic School of Algiers
2. 2Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Université de Bretagne Occidentale; Institut de Recherche Dupuy de Lôme