1. DUAL TRANSFORMER-LESS SINGLE-STAGE CURRENT SOURCE
INVERTER WITH ENERGY MANAGEMENT CONTROL STRATEGY
ABSTRACT:
Alternative energy sources have for some time attracted great interest in the area of static converter
development. This fact is related in greater part to issues such as sustainability and detrimental effects on the
natural environment, which all contribute to the viability of this type of energy source. In this context, power
electronics performs important tasks making viable the connection of all these kind of clean power sources
to the conventional grid and also to the load. From this perspective, a new challenge must be faced which is
the development of energy management systems capable of providing intelligent planning and control of
appliances in low- and high-power applications. That being so, this paper intends to contribute presenting a
novel dual transformerless single-stage current source inverter fed by a proton exchange membrane fuel cell
(PEMFC) and a photovoltaic (PV) array. High voltage gain and totally controlled output voltage can be
achieved without using dedicated step-up dc-dc converters or transformers either. The main feature of this
inverter structure is the intelligent power management technique which focuses on the extraction of
maximum power from the PV array keeping the PEMFC as an energy storage system. Theoretical analysis is
presented and corroborated by experimental results of a 400 W laboratory prototype.