Multilevel inverter technology has emerged recently as a very important alternative in the area of high-power medium-voltage energy control. This paper presents the most important topologies like diode-clamped inverter (neutral-point clamped), capacitor-clamped (flying capacitor), and cascaded multicell with separate DC sources. Emerging topologies like asymmetric hybrid cells and soft-switched multilevel inverters are also discussed. This paper also presents the most relevant control and modulation methods developed for this family of converters: multilevel sinusoidal pulsewidth modulation, multilevel selective harmonic elimination, and space-vector modulation. Special attention is dedicated to the latest and more relevant applications of these converters such as laminators, conveyor belts, and unified power-flow controllers. The need of an active front end at the input side for those inverters supplying regenerative loads is also discussed, and the circuit topology options are also presented. Finally, the peripherally developing areas such as high-voltage high-power devices and optical sensors and other opportunities for future development are addressed.

A bidirectional dc-dc converter typically consists of a buck and a boost converters. In order to have high-power density, the converter can be designed to operate in discontinuous conducting mode (DCM) such that the passive inductor can be minimized. The DCM operation associated current ripple can be alleviated by interleaving multiphase currents. However, DCM operation tends to increase turnoff loss because of a high peak current and its associated parasitic ringing due to the oscillation between the inductor and the device output capacitance. Thus, the efficiency is suffered with the conventional DCM operation. Although to reduce the turnoff loss a lossless capacitor snubber can be added across the switch, the energy stored in the capacitor needs to be discharged before device is turned on. This paper adopts a gate signal complimentary control scheme to turn on the nonactive switch and to divert the current into the antiparalleled diode of the active switch so that the main switch can be turned on under zero-voltage condition. This diverted current also eliminates the parasitic ringing in inductor current. For capacitor value selection, there is a tradeoff between turnon and turnoff losses. This paper suggests the optimization of capacitance selection through a series of hardware experiments to ensure the overall power loss minimization under complimentary DCM operating condition. According to the suggested design optimization, a 100-kW hardware prototype is constructed and tested. The experimental results are provided to verify the proposed design approach.

In this paper, smooth mode transfers and accurate current sharing are performed in a multi-inverter-based microgrid system by the designed system level controls with control area network communication. Controllers of individual inverters within the microgrid in both grid-tie and islanding modes are also designed to ensure high-quality output waveforms. The mode transfer tests are conducted with an inverter-simulated grid to define the proper transfer procedures. Experimental results show that the inverters can provide stable outputs in different basic microgrid operation modes. With the designed current sharing scheme, the output current is equally shared among paralleled inverters without noticeable circulating current. Both the simulation and experimental results of mode transfer show that the multi-inverter-based microgrid system is able to smoothly switch between the grid-tie and islanding modes to guarantee an uninterrupted power supply to the critical loads within the microgrid.

Lithium-ion-based battery energy storage system has started to become the most popular form of energy storage system for its high charge and discharge efficiency and high energy density. This paper proposes a high-efficiency grid-tie lithium-ion-battery-based energy storage system, which consists of a LiFePO₄-battery-based energy storage and a high-efficiency bidirectional ac-dc converter. The battery management system estimates the state of charge and state of health of each battery cell and applies active charge equalization to balance the charge of all the cells in the pack. The bidirectional ac-dc converter works as the interface between the battery pack and the ac grid. A highly efficient opposed-current half-bridge-type inverter along with an admittance-compensated quasi-proportional resonant controller is adopted to ensure high power quality and precision power flow control. A 1-kW prototype has been designed and implemented to validate the proposed architecture and system performance.