A Novel Bidirectional DC-DC Converter for Dynamic Performance Enhancement of Hybrid AC/DC Microgrid

The conventional bidirectional DC-DC converter (BDC), which employs a half-bridge configuration, has some major disadvantages, including a controller designed for one direction with poor performance in the other direction, a bidirectional operation which does not have symmetrical voltage gain resulting in asymmetrical operation, and step-up and step-down switches that are simultaneously modulated, thereby increasing switching losses. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a new, nonisolated, DC-DC converter for the bidirectional power flow of battery energy storage applications in DC and hybrid microgrids (HMGs). The proposed converter uses two back-to-back Boost converters with two battery voltage levels, which eliminates step-down operation to obtain symmetric gains and dynamics in both directions. In discharge mode, two battery sections are in parallel connection at a voltage level lower than the grid voltage. In charge mode, two battery sections are in series connection at a voltage level higher than the grid voltage. Simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed converter in the MATALB\Simulink environment. The results show that the proposed converter has promising performance compared to that of the conventional type. Moreover, the novel converter adds no complexity to the control system and does not incur considerable power loss or capital cost.