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Owing to the considerable shortage of traditional energy sources, utilization of renewable energy is gaining attention. Thus, the high-voltage inverters for solar and wind power generation systems are in huge demand. Modular inverters are more preferred over singular capacity inverters due to their numerous benefits such as relieving of thermal management, fault tolerance, reduced component stress, and modularity. This article proposes a parallel-configured improved Z-source inverter (ZSI) based on transformer. The proposed circuit has increased voltage gain with the combined benefits of paralleling inverters. Also, it offers lower harmonic distortion and lower filter requirements by employing the interleaved pulsewidth modulation strategy. Two parallel-connected transformer-based improved ZSI is first analyzed in detail, and the similar concept is then applied to N parallel-connected transformer-based improved ZSI. A hardware prototype is implemented in laboratory, and it is tested experimentally for high power applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a family of single-phase transformer based Z-source ac–ac converters (ZSACs). The proposed converters inherit all the benefits associated with the classical single-phase ZSAC, which are providing the buck–boost operation, maintaining or reversing the phase angle, and improving reliability. The proposed converters also have the improved input profile, continuous input current, and shared ground between input and output. Moreover, they use the turns ratio of transformers to produce the required voltage gain, which can be tuned by either increasing or decreasing the turns ratio of transformer depending on the configuration of Z-source structure. A safe-commutation strategy is also presented to achieve the soft commutation, which eliminates the voltage and current spikes without any additional snubber circuits. The features of proposed converters are comprehensively discussed with the detailed theoretical analysis. Thereafter, its performances are evaluated by both simulation and experimental tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]