Design and Analysis of Quadratic Buck Converter Based on the Reduced Redundant Power Processing

Due to the growing interest in the production of renewable energy sources, there is a great effort to improve the performance of these systems. Therefore, dc/dc converters play a fundamental role, being a relevant research topic for the power industry, which aims to increase the energy efficiency of these systems. There is currently a significant number of techniques or strategies that aim to provide high efficiencies to dc/dc converters. This article analyzes a buck converter with quadratic gain and differential output voltage based on a technique for the reduction of redundant power processing. The proposed converter consists of two conventional buck converters with a storage buffer element and a three-port structure, where there is a path between the first converter and the load. The resulting converter exhibits low voltage stress on the switching elements and improves the efficiency of the power transference process. In addition, a theoretical design methodology, the experimental validation and analysis of efficiency in an experimental prototype, is presented.