A Family of Improved Dual-Buck DC–AC Inverters and Dual-Boost AC–DC Converters

Conventional cascaded dual-buck dc-ac inverters and dual-boost ac-dc converters can achieve high efficiency by using power MOSFETs without causing reverse recovery issues. In addition, these topologies can provide high reliability by eliminating shoot-through issues. As a result, dead-time in the switching signals can be eliminated and higher switching frequencies can be used. However, these topologies have a major and serious drawback of having more inductors in them and a high magnetic volume. This paper presents a family of improved dual-buck dc-ac inverters and dual-boost ac-dc converters with fewer inductors that can effectively mitigate the high magnetic volume and large number of inductors problems without adding any complexity to the control or hardware. The proposed dualbuck inverters (DBI) and dual-boost converters have all the aforementioned benefits of conventional DBIs and dual-boost converters, respectively. In addition, they reduce the magnetic volume, cost, and complexity of the circuit layout through the use of fewer inductors. To validate the feasibility of the proposed topologies, experimental results of the proposed 2-kW cascaded dual-buck dc-ac inverter with 310 V
_dc
input voltage and 420 V
_rms
output voltage are provided.