A Switched-Capacitor Double Boost Converter for a Photovoltaic Application

This paper presents a single-phase DC-DC Boost converter where the switched-capacitor technique was applied. The proposed converter has a middle point in DC-link. This characteristic allows input and output terminals to be at the same reference. DC-link presents twice the ordinary boost converter voltage. The proposed solution is suitable to Photovoltaic Grid Connected Inverters applications, operating with a NPC inverter. The converter was designed aiming a solution to the high dv/dt problems. These problems are inherent between the traditional converter and inverter structures of PV systems. A 100W operational lab model was built and tested. The experimental results are in accordance with the theoretical results. An efficiency of 96% was achieved.