A New Medium Voltage Modular Multilevel Inverter with Advanced Carrier-Based Pulse Width Modulation for Solar Photovoltaic Systems

Abstract

For medium and high-power applications, reduced switch multilevel inverters (MLI) have drawn considerable attention from the industry and the academia alike due to their diverse benefits like the requirement of a smaller number of voltage sources and switching devices, and better control functionalities compared to the traditional MLI topologies. In this paper, a new symmetric MLI is proposed for the grid integrated photovoltaic (PV) power generation system. An extensive comparison demonstrates that the number of the switching devices with the proposed topology is less in comparison to that of the existing MLI topologies, which is the main objective of this paper. The proposed topology is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink to carry out the necessary analysis and comparisons to the existing ones in terms of the number of switching devices and power diodes, cost, weight, and the percentage of total harmonic distortion. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed topology uses only 67% switching devices and 40% power diodes than other MLI topologies to generate 15 level output voltage with low total harmonic distortion than existing topologies. Due to the reduced switching devices and power diodes count, the proposed topology offers less switching loss as well as increased efficiency with the reduced overall system cost. The proposed MLI topology has a great potential for the industry applications and the realization of a sustainable solar PV system.