High-frequency-link micro-inverter with front-end current-fed half-bridge boost converter and half-wave cycloconverter

A high-frequency-link micro-inverter is proposed for integrating a single photovoltaic panel to a local load or utility grid. The number of power switches is minimized in addition to reduced magnetic components in order to design a low cost, light weight, compact and efficient inverter. A front-end current-fed isolated boost converter is used to integrate the photovoltaic panel to the rest of micro-inverter that consists of a half-wave cycloconverter and half-bridge inverter. The two basic building modules are interconnected via a high voltage DC-link capacitor. A series resonant tank is used to implement soft-switching in the half-bridge inverter and in the half-wave cycloconverter at the grid side. A highly optimized switching scheme is proposed to have soft-switching in all possible power conversion stages. The proposed micro-inverter is simulated using the MATLAB/Simulink Simpower block-set and with PSIM in order to verify the feasibility of the proposed converter and the effectiveness of the proposed switching control scheme.