| Of all the sources of renewable energy, solar photovoltaics has seen the largest growth in the past decade.But there are still several technical challenges to be addressed to handle the variability of solar under high PV penetration scenarios. In fact, it can be addressed by innovation in power electronics. A distributed N-port converter architecture can integrate advanced functionalities to address solar PV variability. The building block for such a system is the three level Neutral Point Clamped Dual Active Bridge (NPC DAB). In this thesis, a new trapezoidal current modulation technique is proposed for soft-switching operation of NPC DAB in with to improve efficiency and decrease size.;The first part of the thesis, reviews the existing modulation technique for soft-switching operations. The second part proposes a trapezoidal current modulation to NPC DAB that enables ZCS and ZVS for all switches in the converter. This leads to reduce switching losses and hence contribute to improve efficiency. Analysis and simulation results are presented to verify proposed modulation technique. |
