New Configuration of Five-Level NPC Inverter with Three-Level Boost Converter for Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conversion

Abstract

This paper deals with the modeling and control of a new two-stage photovoltaic conversion cascade composed of a Three-Level Boost (3LB) converter and a three-phase NPC five-level inverter (5LI). The main objective is to ensure the continuity of energy transfer from a renewable continuous source to the electrical grid while regulating the voltages of the DC bus capacitors with a new proposed configuration. The 3LB is controlled in MPPT based on fuzzy logic. A PI regulator is introduced into the 3LB regulation loop in order to maintain the equality of the two output voltages. The overall voltage of the DC bus being regulated by the control of the multilevel inverter interconnected to the grid, using synchronous reference frame control. Therefore, in our case there is the problem of voltages imbalance caused by the 5LI. We propose in this work to introduce two Clamping Bridges (CBs) each one is composed by a transistor in series with a resistor. These CBs are introduced in parallel with two capacitors of the DC bus. This solution avoids us to use the control algorithm by redundant configurations in the regulation loop of the 5LI. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the proposed control in stabilizing and maintaining the four DC bus voltages at equal values. With four balanced capacitor voltages, we get symmetrical inverter output voltage waveforms, which directly affects the quality of the current injected to the grid.