Phase-Shifted Cascaded Dual-Buck AC–AC Converter With Less Number of Inductors

This article presents an improved cascaded dual-buck ac–ac converter that requires fewer inductors, resulting in increased power density and reduced converter cost. By utilizing standard low-voltage rating devices, the proposed converter is capable of achieving a higher output voltage. In addition, the proposed converter is not affected by the current shoot-through and does not need dead-time. Furthermore, it does not need lossy snubber circuits or dedicated pulsewidth modulation (PWM) strategies. Moreover, the proposed converter enhances efficiency by utilizing
mosfet
s and eliminates the loss of reverse recovery and related issues by disabling their body diodes. These features allow the proposed converter to be designed with a reduced level of control complexity, high reliability, high efficiency, and obtain output waveforms with less distortion. To decrease the volume of inductors and capacitors, the cascaded units are operated using a phase-shifted PWM scheme. To confirm the practicability of the proposed converter, both the simulation and experimental results of the two-unit 2 kW cascaded ac–ac converter with 220
$\ {{{\bm{V}}}_{{\bm{rms}}}}$
input voltage, and 350
${{{\bm{V}}}_{{\bm{rms}}}}$
output voltage is provided.