Alternating link conversion
Associating converters ensuring an energy link

The main advantages of AC link power conversion have already been mentioned in the introduction. Generally speaking, this link will enable the switches to be soft-switched. So, compared with a direct converter operating with hard switching, the operating frequency of the switches can be increased. This reduces the volume and weight of the filter elements used at the input and output of the converter chain. The same applies if a transformer is placed in the AC link to achieve galvanic isolation or voltage/current level matching.

AC link conversion is used today in many fields, such as medical applications (high-voltage power supplies for X-ray tubes), embedded systems (compact isolated converters), laboratory power supplies (low-distortion precision power supplies)...

In the introduction, we presented several topological variants of alternative...