Abstract
This article proposed a nonisolated symmetrical interleaved multilevel boost converter for high-voltage microgrid applications. The proposed converter configuration is derived from the integration of a voltage multiplier (VM) circuit with the front-end structure of the classical two-phase interleaved converter. Moreover, equal voltage rating capacitors and diodes are suitable to design multiple stages of the proposed converter. The proposed converter can feed from two independent sources or single source in the interleaved approach. The continuous input current, high-voltage gain, reduced voltage rating of capacitor (that causes reduction in cost), reduced components, and flexibility in number of sources make the proposed converter more attractive for renewable dc-microgrid applications such as, photovoltaic (PV) system, fuel cell (FC) system, and hybrid PV-FC system. Furthermore, the voltage gain of the converter can be increased by just adding similar stages of VM without preferring the high-voltage rating capacitors and without disturbing the front-end structure of the converter. Nonidealities are considered to analyze the proposed converter in a more practical way. The characteristics and operation of the proposed converter are discussed in this article with the continuous conduction mode and Discontinuous Conduction Mode boundary conditions. The design of the reactive components and selection of semiconductor devices are discussed. Additionally, the proposed converter is compared with recently proposed dc-dc multilevel converters. To support the proposed work, simulation and experimental results are provided which shows a good agreement with the analytical approach.