Cooperative Operation of Parallel Connected Boost Converters for Low Voltage-High Power Applications: An Experimental Approach

Abstract

Modern power conversion devices have realized several significant attributes such as high efficiency and reliability for high power (HP) applications. Traditionally, boost converters (BC) are required to operate as an intermediate interface to drive high power loads through available low voltage (LV) sources such as a fuel cell (FC), photovoltaic or battery based energy system. This paper addresses the complementary operation of parallel connected boost converters (PCBC) for high power applications considering wide spectrum of low voltage source conditions. The mutual sharing of load current between parallel connected converters is guaranteed by the appropriate placement of LC based passive equalization filter (LCEF) therefore offloading stress from individual converter and increasing efficiency and reliability drastically. To validate the performance of proposed topology in real-time scenarios, an experimental setup consisting of programmable source, electronic load, boost converters and filter circuit has been synthesized and studied in various operating conditions such as FC energy system based HP and LV application. The experimental results clarifies and validates the necessity of parallel connected converters based power splitting strategy and LC equalization filter topology for high power loads especially with low voltage source conditions.