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This paper presents a five-level flying capacitor multilevel (FCML) converter with an integrated auxiliary power converter to supply power to the controller and gate drive circuitry. The auxiliary power converter is sourced from within the FCML converter at a naturally occurring low-voltage node, reducing the voltage rating requirements by 75% and thus the size of the auxiliary converter. The auxiliary load current drawn from the FCML converter induces an imbalance in the flying capacitors, which is detrimental to the capacitor and switch ratings if left unchecked. To compensate for this imbalance, an active-balancing method is proposed that adjusts the phase and duty cycle of the traditional phase-shifted pulsewidth modulated control signals. The active balancing requires only a single capacitor voltage measurement and proportional control with no additional hardware components. A start-up circuit is proposed to power the auxiliary power supply and soft-start the FCML converter. Experimental results have been demonstrated with an experimental prototype resulting in an excellent flying capacitor balancing and FCML start-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, switched-capacitor (SC) converters have suffered from high transient currents, which limit both the efficiency and power density of such converters. Soft-charging operation can be employed to eliminate the current transients and greatly improve the power density of SC converters. In this approach, a second-stage magnetic converter is cascaded with the SC stage to act as a controlled current load. Another approach is to use resonant SC converters with zero-current switching. This paper shows that resonant and soft-charging operations of SC converters are closely related, and a technique will be proposed, which achieves either operation by adding a single inductor to existing SC topologies. In addition, since most preexisting resonant or soft-charging SC converters were devised in an ad-hoc manner, this paper formulates an analytical method that can determine whether an existing conventional SC converter topology is compatible with the proposed approach. A number of common SC topologies are analyzed, including Dickson, series-parallel, ladder, Fibonacci, and doubler configurations. Through comparison to simulated results, as well as experimental work, the proposed method is validated and a family of high-performance SC converters is obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid and resonant switched-capacitor (SC) convertersenable efficient utilization of both active and passive components, and have the potential to achieve higher efficiency and higher power density than conventional SC and magnetic-based converters. One or more added inductors offer an additional degree of freedom in the design space. It is of great interest to understand the tradeoffsbetween capacitor and inductor size and volume allocation. In this article, we analyze the reactive energy processed by the passive components and use it to calculate the total passive component volume. It is shown that the total passive component volume of resonant SC (ReSC) converters can be expressed as a function of flying capacitor voltage ripple, and the optimized capacitor voltage ripple that minimizes the total volume is dependent on topology specific parameters and the relative energy density ratio between capacitors and inductors. Moreover, we also demonstrate through theoretical analysis and experimentation that ReSC converters use significantly less passive component volume than conventional SC and buck converters for the same amount of power converted. Next, to compare different ReSC topologies, a normalized passive volume parameter is proposed for simple and fair comparison. This can be used along with a normalized switch stress parameter (based on switch VA ratings) to create a framework to showcase the relative performance of different topologies. This framework can be used to visualize and compare the passive and active component utilization among different topologies. Additionally, the proposed reactive power analysis is extended to hybrid converters with regulation capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of multilevel conversion in dc–dc applications that require a large voltage conversion ratio. A quantitative method that can serve as a guide to compare and design multilevel topologies for large conversion ratio applications is presented. The proposed method keeps the conduction loss and switching loss constant across the different converters and employs the passive component volume as the single performance metric. As examples, flying capacitor multilevel converters and hybrid switched-capacitor (SC) converters are compared to conventional two-level buck converters, and are shown analytically to have significantly reduced passive component size. Three converter prototypes are implemented, based on the presented methodology to experimentally validate the method as well as demonstrate the advantages of multilevel and hybrid SC converters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multilevel inverters such as the flying capacitor multilevel inverter (FCML) hold large potential benefit in applications where the size and weight of the inverter is constrained. This article presents the design and implementation of an inverter module that incorporates two individual nine-level FCML single-phase inverters in an interleaved design. Each inverter utilizes GaN field-effect transistors (FETs) switching at 100 kHz for an effective inductor ripple frequency of 800 kHz. The implementation features an innovative dual-sided integrated switching cell layout, which decreases the commutation loop inductance of the inverter and allows fast switching with minimal ringing, while also enabling efficient double-sided cooling. The switching cell layout is particularly well suited for high-voltage applications, as creepage and clearance requirements can be easier met compared to single-sided solutions. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated in a hardware inverter prototype intended for driving low-inductance electric machines for future electric aircrafts. The 1000 $\mathbf {V_{dc}}$ to 380  $\mathbf {V_{ac,rms}}$ , 6-kW prototype achieves a peak efficiency of 98.6% and a peak power density of 15 kW/kg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the theory and implementation of a distributed algorithm for controlling differential power processing converters in photovoltaic (PV) applications. This distributed algorithm achieves true maximum power point tracking of series-connected PV submodules by relying only on local voltage measurements and neighbor-to-neighbor communication between the differential power converters. Compared to previous solutions, the proposed algorithm achieves reduced number of perturbations at each step and potentially faster tracking without adding extra hardware; all these features make this algorithm well-suited for long submodule strings. The formulation of the algorithm, discussion of its properties, as well as three case studies are presented. The performance of the distributed tracking algorithm has been verified via experiments, which yielded quantifiable improvements over other techniques that have been implemented in practice. Both simulations and hardware experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed distributed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]