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Renewable energy sources employ a power conditioning unit for injecting power into the grid. Such resources of small capacity are characterized by low generated voltage and thus require a high voltage boost at the inversion stage. This paper proposes a novel transformer‐less, single‐phase grid‐connected, 13‐level inverter to yield the voltage boost. The presented topology is realized through 12 unidirectional switches, 2 diodes, and 3 capacitors. A single‐stage circuit synthesizes 13 levels with a single input source and yielding an overall voltage gain of six. The adapted modulation technique is robust enough to keep the capacitors self‐balanced for all values of the modulation index. The proposed topology is modular and cost‐effective in comparison to other similar typologies due to reduced device count and space requirement. The presented topology is validated experimentally with satisfactory operation in yielding input voltage boost by a factor of six.

The battery charging power electronics interface of an electric vehicle (EV) must be capable of bidirectional power flow to enable both grid-to-vehicle (G2V) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) operations. In the presence of a single/three-phase AC supply, the front-end of the EV charger employs a power factor correction (PFC) rectifier, which should have the bidirectional capability to facilitate V2G mode. A conventional active rectifier functions in boost mode while performing PFC and voltage regulation. In most of the currently available EVs, however, the battery nominal voltage is low and, hence, a downstream high step-down DC-DC converter and high voltage DC bus capacitor are required in the charging interface. To overcome these issues, this work proposes a bidirectional AC-to-DC buck rectifier topology that can operate in G2V and V2G modes, both in single- and three-phase versions. The proposed topology utilizes the switched capacitors principle to achieve self-balancing of voltages in the capacitors. In addition, it is highly modular in structure. This paper describes the proposed topology, its working and modulation and its applications. The hardware proto model is used to validate the proposed power converter and the control approach to achieve PFC and voltage regulation. In addition, a comparison with other topologies is presented to demonstrate its competence.

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