Due to their remarkable merits, the soft-switching ac-link universal power converters have received noticeable attention during the last few years. These converters, which can be configured as dc-dc, dc-ac, ac-dc, or ac-ac, are compact, reliable, and offer longer life time compared to the other types of converters. However, they require more switches, which make the control process more complicated. This paper proposes a modified configuration for the dc-ac power conversion, which reduces the number of switches without changing the principles of operation. This converter, which is named sparse ac-link buck-boost inverter, reduces the number of switches from 20 to 18. Despite reducing the number of switches, the partial resonant time, during which no power is transferred, is as short as the original configuration. An important feature of this inverter is that it can be fabricated by IGBT modules, which are more compact and more cost-effective compared to the discrete devices. This paper presents the principles of the operation of this configuration, and compares the efficiency, the failure rate, and the current rating of the switches in the proposed and original inverters. It is shown that the failure rates of the sparse configuration are lower than the original configuration. Therefore, they have longer lifetime. The efficiency of the sparse configuration is slightly lower than that of the original configuration. However, by using reverse blocking IGBTs in the sparse configuration, the efficiency of the proposed inverter will be improved significantly. This paper evaluates the performance of the proposed inverter through simulation and experiment. 2014 IEEE.
