Modified Synchronous Pulsewidth Modulation of Current-Fed Five-Level Inverter for Solar Integration

Large-scale photovoltaic (LSPV) energy conversion systems have been installed at many places across the world. The essential component of the LSPV system is the dc-ac conversion stage. The usage of multilevel converters is one of the recent advances in the dc-ac conversion stage of the LSPV system to enable transformer-less inversion. Current-fed multilevel inverter has been chosen in this paper as it provides high power inversion with inherent voltage boosting, and thus, avoids the usage of transformer. High power conversion necessitates low device switching frequency operation in order to satisfy thermal constraint of semiconductor devices and also to improve efficiency. However, low device switching frequency operation leads to higher harmonic distortion of inverter output currents. Synchronous optimal pulsewidth modulation (SOP) technique is an emerging low device switching frequency modulation technique that has been successfully implemented for voltage-source multilevel inverters. However, the state-of-the-art SOP technique cannot be directly applied to modulate current-source multilevel inverter topologies due to additional constraints on the switching commutations. Therefore, the purpose of our study was to propose a modified SOP technique to achieve: low device switching frequency and minimal harmonic distortion of inverter output currents. The topology of current-fed five-level inverter was used for demonstrating the performance of proposed technique. A generalized conversion method was introduced in the modified SOP technique for including switching constraints of the current-fed inverter. In addition, a state-sequencing machine was developed by utilizing redundant inverter states to produce equal switching commutation among all semiconductor devices at minimal switching frequency of 350 Hz. The experimental results obtained from the five-level current-source inverter of 1.2 kW demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed SOP technique.