General and Specific Operations: It will be apparent to persons skilled in the relevant arts that, for a given set of circuit elements, the functions and outputs of an electrical circuit will vary depending on variations in the routing and connections of those components. The present system and method takes bridge converter power stages (in an embodiment, H-bridges) and modifies them with the addition of new components, such as inductors; and/or by rerouting some circuit paths.
For an exemplary adaptable power stage A-PS 300, and as discussed above, Table Λ 390 of FIG. 3C presents the resulting power conversion modes when various electrical contactors 350 are set to open or closed positions in various combinations. It will be noted from Table Λ 390 that, in some operational modes CMn, the mode 392 may be determined both by the settings 350 for open/closed switches CMn, and by the choice of power input or power output 397 at terminal nodes 302.1, 302.2, (An, Bn) and (Xn, Yn) respectively. That is, for some modes of operation 392—for instance, exemplary modes CM1 and CM2—identical settings of switches 350 result in different operational modes (buck or boost, respectively) depending on whether the DC input voltage is applied to node 302.1 (An, Bn) or to node 302.2 (Xn, Yn).
For exemplary A-PS 300 of FIG. 3A, FIGS. 4A, 4B, 4C, and 4D illustrate the resulting effective circuit configurations for the various switch settings 395 of the different conversion modes CM 392.
