Renewable energy sources, such as solar energy and fuel cells, are desirable due to their pollution-free properties. In order to utilize the present infrastructure of the utility grid for power transmission and distribution, grid-connected inverters are required for distributed generation systems, which should have high reliability. However, a shoot-through problem, which is a major deterrent to the reliability of the inverters, exists in the conventional bridge-type voltage-source inverters. In order to solve the aforementioned problem, this paper proposes a two-switch dual-buck grid-connected inverter. The freewheeling current flows through the independent diodes instead of the body diodes of the switches, so reverse-recovery loss of the diodes can be reduced. Half of the power devices operate in high frequency; the others switch at grid period with zero-current switching. Moreover, unipolar modulation is used. The operating principle, design guidelines and example, and stability analysis are provided. The proposed inverter can be simplified to a current amplifier with hysteresis current control, so it is globally stable. Simulation and experimental results verify the theoretical analysis and satisfy IEEE Std. 929-2000. A comparison of a full-bridge inverter and the proposed inverter shows that the proposed inverter is more attractive in high-reliability applications.
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