A Novel Bidirectional Flying Inductor-Based Converter for Dual-Purpose Application

This paper presents a new flying inductor-based converter as a power electronics interface suitable for application in both DC or single-phase AC grids using the same terminals. This topology does not need to have a mid-point of DC sources or DC-bus capacitors at the input side of the inverter and only have one main inductor to transfer energy. Therefore, the power density of the proposed converter is extremely high, achieving <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4.7 \, \text{W/cm}^{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula> at 5 kW. The voltage boosting feature in a single-stage and operation in a wide range of input DC power supply is the other benefit of the proposed solution. Since electrolytic capacitors are not used in the structure, the life of the converter is increased. The operation modes of the converter are explained in detail. To verify the performance of the proposed topology, a prototype (2.5 kW/5 kW) was built and tested in the laboratory. The related experimental results are presented.