Variable frequency drives typically have employed dc voltage or current links for power distribution between the input and output converters and as a means to temporarily store energy. The dc link based power conversion systems have several inherent limitations. One of the important limitations is the high switching loss and high device stress which occur during switching intervals. This severely reduces the practical switching frequencies. Additionally, while the cost, size, and weight of the basic voltage sourced PWM drive is attractive, difficulties with input harmonics, output dV/dt and over-voltage, EMI/RFI, tripping with voltage sags, and other problems significantly diminish the economic competiveness of these drives. Add-ons are available to mitigate these problems, but may result in doubling or tripling the total costs and losses, with accompanying large increases in volume and weight. This research investigates the design, control, operation and efficiency calculation of a new power converter topology for medium and high power ac-ac, ac-dc and dc-ac applications. An ac-link formed by an inductor-capacitor pair replaces the conventional dc-link. Each leg of the converter is formed by two bidirectional switches. Power transfer from input to output is accomplished via a link inductor which is first charged from the input phases, then discharged to the output phases with a precisely controllable current PWM technique. Capacitance in parallel with the link inductor produces low turn-off losses. Turn-on is always at zero voltage as each switch swings from reverse to forward bias. Reverse recovery is with low dI/dt and also is buffered due to the link capacitance.

It is customary to obtain ac power from batteries through a power converter, where mains ac power is not readily available. Such a power converter is also needed in several mobile/ airborne/ space applications. Till recently this application is served by a H bridge inverter followed by a low frequency transformer and a passive low pass filter. The H bridge inverter employs high frequency pulse width modulation. The transformer is made of standard silicon steel. The filter is made of L and C elements. In such a converter the magnetics account for about 30% of cost and 50% of weight. Moreover the dc input current in such converters is discontinuous, leading to poor efficiency. There is need for an input filter as well. This thesis presents the development of an inverter with high frequency (hf) link. The power converter employs a boost front end resulting in continuous input current. The H bridge inverter employs phase modulation technique with soft switching features. The boost converter and the H bridge share power devices. The isolation transformer handles high frequency ac power and is compact. It is shown that the transformer size can be reduced by more than one order of magnitude. There is a rear end cycloconverter to reconvert the high frequency ac power into 50 Hz output power. Innovative pulse sequencing in the cycloconverter ensures loss-less switching. The pulse width modulation shifts the dominant harmonic frequency to double the switching frequency. The output LC filter is light. The converter can handle bidirectional power. The controller is digital. The overall concept was demonstrated through the 500 W prototype design. The proposed topology offers small size, low losses and continous input current. The controller is digital and offers totally software based compensation and settings. It is expected that on account of the small size and cost, this topology is likely to become more popular in the near future. The applications of such power converters will bring down the size and cost of UPS, solar inverters, wind mill inverters etc.

In this dissertation the ac-link universal power converters, which are a new class of power converters, are introduced and studied in detail. The inputs and outputs of these converters may be dc, ac, single phase, or multi-phase. Therefore, they can be used in a variety of applications, including photovoltaic power generation, wind power generation, and electric vehicles. In these converters the link current and voltage are both alternating and their frequency can be high, which leads to the elimination of the dc electrolytic capacitors and the bulky low-frequency transformers. Therefore, the ac-link universal power converters are expected to have higher reliability and smaller size. Moreover, these converters are soft switching, which results in negligible switching losses and minimized current and voltage stress over devices. In the first part of the dissertation, the parallel ac-link universal power converter is studied in detail. This converter is an extension of the buck-boost converter. The series ac-link universal power converter, which is dual of the parallel ac-link universal power converter, is proposed in the second part of this dissertation. This converter is an extension of the Cuk converter. A modified configuration with fewer switches, named sparse ac-link universal power converter is proposed in the third part of this dissertation. The sparse ac-link universal power converters can appear as parallel or series. The performance of all these configurations is evaluated through simulations and experiments.

Renewable energy sources normally require power converters to convert their energy into standardized regulated ac output. The motivation for this thesis is to design and control power converters for renewable energy systems to ensure very good power quality, efficiency and reliability. The renewable energy sources considered are low voltage dc sources such as photovoltaic (PV) modules. Two transformer-isolated power circuit topologies with input voltage of less than 50V are designed and developed for low and medium power applications. Various design and control issues of these converters are identified and new solutions are proposed. For low power rating of a few hundred watts, a line-frequency transformer interfaced inverter is developed. In the grid connected operation, it is observed that this topology injects considerable lower order odd and even harmonics in the grid current. The reasons for this are identified. A new current control method using adaptive harmonic compensation technique and a proportional-resonant-integral (PRI) controller is proposed. The proposed current controller is designed to ensure that the grid current harmonics are within the limits set by the IEEE 1547-2003 standard. Phase-locked loops (PLLs) are used for grid synchronization of power converters in grid-tied operation and for closed-loop control reference generation. Analysis and design of synchronous reference frame PLL (SRF-PLL) and second-order generalized integrator (SOGI) based PLLs considering unit vector distortion under the possible non-ideal grid conditions of harmonics, unbalance, dc offsets and frequency deviations are proposed and validated. Both SRF-PLL and SOGI-PLL are low-complexity PLLs. The proposed designs achieve fastest settling time for these PLLs for a given worst-case input condition. The harmonic distortion and dc offsets in the resulting unit vectors are limited to be well within the limits set by the IEEE 1547-2003 standard. The proposed designs can be used to achieve very good performance using conventional low-complexity PLLs without the requirement of advanced PLLs which can be computationally intensive. A high-frequency (HF) transformer interfaced ac link inverter with a lossless snubber is developed medium power level in the order of few kilowatts. The HF transformer makes the topology compact and economical compared to an equally rated line frequency transformer. A new synchronized modulation method is proposed to suppress the possible over-voltages due to current commutation in the leakage inductance of the HF transformer. The effect of circuit non-ideality of turn-on delay time is analyzed. The proposed modulation mitigates the problem of spurious turn-on that can occur due to the turn-on delay time. The HF inverter, rectifier and snubber devices have soft switching with this modulation. A new reliable start-up method is proposed for this inverter topology without any additional start- up circuitry. This solves the problems of over-voltages and inrush currents during start-up. The overall research work reported in the thesis shows that it is possible to have compact, reliable and high performance power converters for renewable energy conversion systems. It is also shown that high control performance and power quality can be achieved using the proposed control techniques of low implementation complexity.