A novel high reliability dual-boost half-bridge reversible PWM rectifier

A novel dual-boost half-bridge (DBHB) reversible pulse width modulation (PWM) rectifier is proposed in this paper. Compared with the conventional full-bridge or half-bridge reversible PWM rectifier, the proposed DBHB rectifier exhibits two distinct advantages: (a) No power switches are connected in series directly in one leg, and the operation reliability is greatly improved for its inherent immunity to short-through problem. (b) The freewheeling current never flows through the body diode of power switches, with reverse recovery dissipation greatly reduced. Hysteresis current control (HCC) method is adopted in the proposed rectifier for its simplicity, natural current limitation, and extremely fast response time. An additional voltage balance loop is employed to eliminate the voltage imbalance between two dc bus split capacitors. The drawbacks of the proposed DBHB topology are the high voltage stress across power switches and the usage of two bulky boost inductors. In order to reduce the voltage stress, a neutral point diode clamped three-level dual-boost half-bridge (TLDBHB) reversible PWM rectifier is then introduced, the voltage stress of each semiconductor is equal to the half dc bus voltage instead of the full dc bus voltage in conventional half-bridge and the proposed DBHB rectifier. A magnetic integration scheme is presented, which can reduce the volume and weight of the boost inductors dramatically. To verify the validity of the proposed scheme, both simulation and experiment are implemented. The peak efficiency of 98% is achieved through a 1 kW laboratory prototype.