Ultracapacitors have been proposed to be utilized in the
electrical distribution system of conventional and hybrid
vehicles to serve applications like local energy cache, voltage
smoothing, pseudo 42V architecture, and service life of
batteries extension. However, the high specific power of
ultracapacitors is the major reason of them being used as
intermediate energy storage unit during acceleration, hill climbing, clmig an and reeertv regenerative brain. braking. Evntog Even though purely uey
ultracapacitor hybrid and electric vehicles . . have been reported, . 'an energy storage unit comprising both batteries and ultracapacitor seem to be the promising choice for the future
vehicles [1]. The basic idea is to realize advantages of both
batteries and ultracapacitors while keeping the weight of the
entire energy storage unit minimized through an appropriate matching [2].
Several structures for combining batteries and ultracapacitors have been introduced in the literature [3].Multi-input power electronic converters are the best promising choices to fully utilize the advantages of batteries and ultracapacitors. As the name suggests, a multi-input converter
is a power converter which accommodates inputs of more than one energy source and provides at least one output [4]. These converters can be employed in various applications such as
residential, aerospace, automotive, portable electronics where
there is the advantage of using more than one energy source or
energy storage device [5]. By diversifying the energy sources,
each source can be utilized more efficiently. Furthermore, the
reliability of the overall system increases.
Several multi-input converters have been reported in the
literature. A general multi-input converter, which only utilizes one inductor, has been reported in [6]. Characteristic and properties of multi-input converters are presented in [7].Applications of multi-input converters in hybrid vehicles are