Partial Power Processing Multi-Port DC-DC Converters

With the favorable merit of handling only a fraction of system power, partial power processing (PPP) converter gains increasing attention in the engineering application with high requirement on power density and efficiency. However, most studies focus on the PPP two-port dc-dc converters, while how to derive PPP multi-port converters is still kept unclear. Hence, this paper aims to explore the principle of PPP multi-port dc-dc converters, and consequently, a family of viable PPP multi-port configurations is derived. In order to achieve a better understanding, PPP three-port converter with three isolated modules is firstly presented and introduced in detail, which has three possible configurations. The voltage relationship among three ports are more flexible than the PPP two-port converter that step-up/down voltage gain can be inherently attained. Moreover, two isolated modules can be further integrated into a hybrid one, so that components are able to be more reduced. By employing typical fully/partially isolated three-port converters such as triple active bridge converter to the proposed configurations, the corresponding PPP three-port converters are simply obtained. Finally, with the increasing number of ports, the configuration and characteristics of PPP multi-port converter will be more diverse. As an example, PPP four-port as well as five-port configurations are shown in the paper.