A review of topologies of three-port DC-DC converters for the integration of renewable energy and energy storage system

The application of renewable energy such as solar photovoltaic (PV), wind and fuel cells is becoming increasingly popular because of the environmental awareness and advances in technology coupled with decreasing manufacturing cost. Power electronic converters are usually used to convert the power from the renewable sources to match the load demand and grid requirement to improve the dynamic and steady-state characteristics of these green generation systems, to provide the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control, and to integrate the energy storage system to solve the challenge of the intermittent nature of the renewable energy and the unpredictability of the load demand. In order to improve the efficiency and the power density of the overall circuit, the use of a three-port DC-DC converter, which includes a DC input port for the renewable source, a bidirectional DC input port for the energy storage system, and a DC output port for supplying the load, is a preferable solution to the traditional method using two DC-DC converters: one for the renewable sources and another for the energy storage system. In recent years, many DC-DC three-port converters have been proposed and reported in the literature. Each of these converters has its own topology and operating principle, which results in different complexities, different numbers of components, different reliability and efficiency. In this paper, a comparison of the features of different topologies of three-port DC-DC converters that have been proposed by different research groups is reviewed briefly. This review can be used as a guide for the appropriate selection of the suitable topology to meet the particular requirement of a system. The paper also discusses the potential research extension of the topologies from three-port DC-DC converters to three-port DC-AC inverters and how the voltage gain of the non-isolated three-port DC-DC converter can be improved.