An Interlinking Converter for Renewable Energy Integration into Hybrid Grids

This paper proposes an interlinking converter architecture, which enables flexibly integrating renewable energy into hybrid grids. The proposed converter has one AC port and two DC ports, offering a flexible solution to integrating various DC and AC sources, which can also be versatility configured as a DC-DC converter, a DC-AC inverter, or a DC-DC/AC multiport converter. The general concept of the architecture, its common mode voltage analysis and flexible operation modes are detailed in this letter. Experimental tests are performed on an example converter with a dedicated modulation strategy. The test results confirm the concept in terms of flexible conversion, high power density, low leakage currents as well as controllable power flow.

Keywords: Hybrid DC/AC grid, power converters, renewable energy integration, flexibility, leakage current