A Family of Dual-Buck Inverters With an Extended Low-Voltage DC-Input Port for Efficiency Improvement Based on Dual-Input Pulsating Voltage-Source Cells.

A systematic method to derive the topologies of dual-input (DI) dual-buck inverter (DBI) is proposed in this paper. A family of DI-DBIs is harvested by replacing the buck switching bridges in a traditional DBI with DI pulsating voltage-source cells. In comparison with the traditional DBIs, an additional dc-input port for a low voltage energy source interface is introduced into the inverters. With the extended low-voltage dc-input port, a low-voltage dc source, whose voltage is lower than the peak amplitude of the ac output voltage, is able to supply power to the ac output within single-stage power conversion stage. The conversion stages of the dc /ac power system, the power rating and power losses of the front-end Boost converter of the inverter are reduced. Besides, the voltage stresses and switching losses of the power switches are reduced due to the multi-level characteristics of the proposed DI-DBIs. As a result, the conversion efficiency of the inverter and the overall dc/ac converter is improved effectively. A DI-DBI proposed, named as DB6 inverter, is analyzed in-depth as an example and compared with the traditional DBI to verify the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]