Design of 500W standalone photovoltaic system with reduced switch count multilevel inverter

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to design a highly compatible standalone photovoltaic (PV) system with reduced switch count multilevel inverter (MLI) to feed 500W ac load with better power quality. MLI's are becoming eminent because of their high power capability with low harmonic content. Cascaded multilevel inverters are extensively preferred in PV system because it has a distinctive characteristic of employing separate dc sources. In this paper a reduced switch count multilevel inverter is integrated with standalone PV system, which reduces the switching complexity and gate driver circuits without any compromise in the power quality. The PV system with the boost converter assisted by maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm serves as a dc source for each cell of the reduced switch count MLI. To facilitate proper pulse generation and to reduce the harmonic profile multicarrier level shifted pulse width modulation (PWM) is implemented. Simulation results show that total harmonic distortion (THD) of the inverter is less than 4 percent with inversion efficiency greater than 96 percent.