Performance evaluation of seven level grid-tied PV inverter employs seven switches with the triple gain

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, a novel switched capacitor converter has been proposed to generate 7-levels using seven semiconductor switches (7S7L) to get triple gain in the output voltage which is supplied by a single dc source. A PWM technique, phase disposition pulse width modulation (PD-PWM) has been designed to achieve a suitable switching operation for the 7S7L inverter. In addition, the capacitor voltage is balanced and the suggested inverter uses a charging inductor to decrease the capacitor inrush current, which is a shortcoming in the switched-capacitor multilevel inverters. Moreover, the 7S7L inverter is used to interface the solar panels with the utility grid using a synchronous reference frame-based controller. To check the efficiency, taking actual data, power loss calculation has been discussed for the 7S7L inverter. To illustrate the better performance of the proposed 7S7L inverter than the existing seven-level SC-MLI presented in the literature, a comparative study is also undertaken. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed topology, a converter is simulated using Matlab/Simulink. To validate the simulation results, a real-time study is completed using the OPAL-RT 4510 real-time platform.