Soft switched ac-link wind power converter

A novel soft switched ac-link buck-boost converter for high power ac-ac wind power conversion is proposed. This configuration uses two bi-directional switches per leg of the converter resulting in a 12 bi-directional switch topology. Power transfer is accomplished via a link inductor which is first charged from the input, then discharged to the output with a precisely controllable current PWM technique which results in near zero harmonics at all frequencies below twice the link frequency, as there are two power transfers for each link cycle. Capacitance in parallel with the link inductor produces zero-voltage switching for both turn-on and turn-off.