Multi-Port Power Converters for Hybrid Energy System Applications

The increasing integration of renewable energy sources and energy storage systems in various electrical systems introduces the topic of hybrid energy systems. Power electronics converters play a pivotal role in transforming and transferring the power between energy sources, energy storage systems, and the loads. The traditional approach of using multiple power converters for each of the mentioned components poses challenges including high cost, decrease in the system power density, and communication between the power converters. Multi-port power converters have been proposed as an alternative to employing multiple power converters. Even though several multi-port converters have been proposed in literature, the absence of a systematic approach to develop multi-port converters is one of the main challenges to properly design and optimize these converters based on an application’s criteria and requirements. This dissertation proposes a generalized systematic approach to develop, design, model, and validate multi-port converters for hybrid energy system applications. Multiple cases from literature were used as sample cases to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The proposed generalized approach is used to develop six multi-port power converters for different hybrid energy systems applications. These converters cover a variety of applications including electrification transportation, residential photovoltaic systems, uninterrupted power supplies, and auxiliary power unit for refrigerated vans. This work provides extensive discussions and insights into the capabilities and modes of operation for each of these power converters backed up by experimental verification. Moreover, each converter is compared to a baseline traditional converter to demonstrate the merits and disadvantages of these multi-port converters compared to their conventional counterparts. These comparisons cast light on the various aspects of these converters, including scalability, stresses over components, voltage gains, galvanic isolation, and a relative comparison on efficiencies and power density potentials. Finally, this dissertation provides a roadmap to guide the selection and development of multi-port converters that would be useful for researchers and practicing engineers in the field. This enables the user to determine whether multi-port converters are a good solution for their application, and if yes, provides the tools to use existing topologies, alter them, or design a novel multi-port power converter