Control and design of a novel buck-boost converter for wind turbine applications

A novel single-phase buck-boost converter is proposed for wind turbine applications in both grid-connected mode and stand-alone mode. Topologically, the proposed converter has a low component count with only three power switches, while conventional wind turbine converters may require five switches in two-stage power conversions for the same functions. Functionally, the new converter can adapt to a wide range of wind turbine output voltage variations, lower or higher voltage compared to utility voltage, and in the meantime track the maximum power points of wind turbine all in one single power stage. Analysis, simulation and design of such an inverter are presented in this paper.