A Family of Five-Level Dual-Buck Full-Bridge Inverters for Grid-Tied Applications

Dual-buck inverters feature some attractive merits, such as no reverse recovery issues of the body diodes and free of shoot-through. However, since the filter inductors of dual-buck inverters operate at each half cycle of the utility grid alternately, the inductor capacity of dual-buck inverters is twice as much as H-bridge inverters. Thus, the power density of dual-buck converters needs to be improved, as well as the conversion efficiency. In this paper, the detailed derivation process of two five-level full-bridge topology generation rules are presented and explained. One is the combination of a conventional three-level full-bridge inverter, a two-level capacitive voltage divider, and a neutral point clamped branch. The other method is to combine a three-level half-bridge inverter and a two-level half-bridge inverter. Furthermore, in order to enhance the reliability of existing five-level DBFBI topologies, an extended five-level DBFBI topology generation method is proposed. The two-level half-bridge inverter is replaced by a two-level dual-buck half-bridge inverter; thus, a family of five-level DBFBI topologies with high reliability is proposed. The operation modes, modulation methods, and control strategies of the series-switch five-level DBFBI topology are analyzed in detail. The power device losses of the three-level DBFBI topology and five-level DBFBI topologies, with different switching frequencies, are calculated and compared. Both the relationship between the neutral point potential self-balancing and the modulation index of inverters are revealed. A universal prototype was built up for the experimental tests of the three-level DBFBI topology, the five-level H-bridge inverter topology, and the existing three five-level DBFBI topologies. Experimental results have shown that the five-level DBFBI topologies exhibit higher efficiency than the five-level H-bridge inverter topology and the three-level DBFBI topology. As well, the higher power density has been achieved by the five-level DBFBI topologies compared with the three-level DBFBI topology.