An integrated nine-switch power conditioner

A nine-switch power converter having two sets of output terminals was recently proposed in place of the traditional back-to-back power converter that uses twelve switches in total. The nine-switch converter has already been proven to have certain advantages, in addition to its component saving topological feature. Despite these advantages, the nine-switch converter has so far found limited applications due to its many perceived performance tradeoffs like requiring an oversized dc-link capacitor, limited amplitude sharing and phase shift between its two sets of output terminals. Instead of accepting these tradeoffs as limitations, a nine-switch power conditioner is proposed here that virtually “converts” most short-comings of the nine-switch topology into interesting performance advantages. Aiming further to reduce its switching losses, an appropriate discontinuous modulation scheme is proposed and studied here in details to doubly ensure that maximal reduction of commutations is achieved. With an appropriately designed control scheme then incorporated, the nine-switch converter is shown to favorably raise the overall power quality in simulation, hence justifying its role as a power conditioner at a reduced semiconductor cost.