An isolated soft-switching bidirectional buck-boost inverter for fuel cell applications

This paper presents a new isolated soft-switching bidirectional buck-boost inverter for fuel cell applications. The buckboost inverter combines an isolated DC-DC converter with a conventional inverter to implement buck-boost DC-DC and DC-AC conversion. The main switches achieve zero voltage switching and zero current switching by using a novel synchronous switching SVPWM and the volume of the transformer in the forward and fly-back mode is also minimized. This inverter is suitable for wide input voltage applications due to its high efficiency under all conditions. An active clamping circuit reduces the switch's spike voltage and regenerates the energy stored in the leakage inductance of the transformer; therefore, the overall efficiency is improved. This paper presents the operating principle, a theoretical analysis and design guidelines. Simulation and experimental results have validated the characteristics of the buck-boost inverter.