From Components to Converters: A Fundamental Topology Derivation Method for Single-Inductor Multi-Input Multi-Output Converters Based on Graph Theory

As power electronics converters can be essentially regarded as combinations of different components, a fundamental topology derivation method is proposed to derive effective topologies directly from separated components for single-inductor multi-input multi-output (SI-MIMO) converters in this paper. In the proposed components to converters (C2C) method, there are two critical puzzles to be solved. As the possible connections of components are numerous, how to conveniently and comprehensively acquire viable converter structures and identify effective topologies are difficult to be implemented through pure manual effort. And it will be further deteriorated with the increasing number of components. Therefore, graph theory is also utilized in the proposed C2C method, with which computer code can be developed to automatically complete the topology derivation. In the paper, how to employ graph theory to solve the two puzzles of C2C method is firstly introduced. Then, detailed topology derivation of three-port single-inductor converters with 3 switches and 4 switches are also shown to validate its effectiveness.