For single-phase current source converters, there is an inherent limitation in DC-side low-frequency power oscillation, which is twice the grid fundamental frequency. In practice, it transfers to the DC side and results in the low-frequency DC-link ripple. One possible solution is to install excessively large DC-link inductance for attenuating the ripple. However, it is of bulky size and not cost-effective. Another method is to use the passive LC branch for bypassing the power decoupling, but this is still not cost-effective due to the low-frequency LC circuit. Recently, active power decoupling techniques for the current source converters have been sparsely reported in literature. However, there has been no attempt to classify and understand them in a systematic way so far. In order to fill this gap, an overview of the active power decoupling for single-phase current source converters is presented in this paper. Systematic classification and comparison are provided for researchers and engineers to select the appropriate solutions for their specific applications.

A new single-phase transformerless current source inverter is proposed in this paper. The proposed inverter can achieve leakage current reduction, which is crucial for the conventional current source inverter. The basic concept of the proposed solution is to develop the new inverter by the duality principle from the voltage source inverter. The theoretical analysis is carried out to determine the switching states of the proposed inverter for the leakage current reduction. Also, a new modulation strategy is presented to achieve the optimized switching states. Finally, the experimental results are presented. Comparing with conventional single-phase current source inverter, the leakage current can be significantly reduced by the proposed inverter, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed solution.