Improved current Control of Floating Interleaved Boost Converter Dedicated to Vehicular Applications

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of four-phase Floating Interleaved Boost Converter (FIBC) for vehicular applications. For such applications, current control is indispensable in order to ensure the vehicle power (eventually the current) requirement satisfaction. For this reason, two methods are applied in this work to control the current of the source associated to the studied converter which is a fuel cell in our case. This first method is based on using one current control loop which allows to maintain the total current in the output of the source equal to its reference. The second method consists on improving the first one by applying a current control loop for each converter leg (i.e using four control loops). This converter offers improved efficiency and voltage gain, while ensuring lower input current ripple than other DC-DC boost converter topologies.In this paper, the proposed controls are evaluated for the same road conditions by applying the New European driving cycle (NEDC). Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the two adopted controls and prove the improvements presented by the technology using four control loops.