Nonisolated Harmonics-Boosted Resonant DC/DC Converter With High-Step-Up Gain

High-step-up dc/dc converters are widely required in grid-connected applications with renewable energy sources. An extremely high-ratio step-up nonisolated dc/dc converter, in the form of a harmonics-boosted resonant converter, is proposed in this paper. This proposed converter consists of a high-frequency dc/ac inverter stage that is followed by a passive ac/dc rectifier stage connected in cascade. Conventionally, such a dc/ac inverter is designed to output a pure sinusoidal ac voltage with an amplitude several times the amplitude of the input voltage. However, for the proposed converter, the harmonics-boosted inverter stage is designed to contain selected voltage harmonics that significantly boost the amplitude of its output voltage. This greatly increases the overall gain of the converter. The adopted ac/dc stage is a diode-capacitor rectifier, which is of high efficiency and easily extendable to increase the voltage gain. Importantly, the proposed converter involves only one active switch. With only one active switch, the driver's loss is minimized and the converter's control is simplified. Zero-voltage switching is applied to reduce the switching loss, which also allows the converter to operate efficiently at high frequency, and thus can be designed for high power density. The optimal design of the two converter stages and their combined voltage gain is investigated and reported. Besides, a design guideline of the proposed converter is provided. A prototype of a 57-time harmonics-boosted resonant converter with 3.3 V input voltage, 500 kHz switching frequency, and 21 W output power, is built. The experimental result shows that the achieved converter's efficiency is as high as 88.6%.