Extending Supercapacitor Assisted Loss Management Approach for Efficiency Improvements in Solar Inverters

Renewable energy inverters have several loss components, such as static losses and high frequency switching losses in semiconductors; transformer losses such as copper and core components; and input capacitor losses. For a given power output and an input DC voltage, these losses depend on transistor parameters and transformer specifications in addition to the, voltage stress, rms current in each element. This paper discusses an extension of supercapacitor assisted loss management technique (SCALoM) to reduce the typical losses in solar inverters. Proposed SCA(Supercapacitor assisted)-technique reduces the voltage stress and rms current in the internal components of the inverters. An extensive analysis of the impact of the proposed technique on the power loss components of solar inverters has been carried out in this paper. SCA-inverter arrangement makes it possible to operate the inverters with higher valued voltage sources than their input voltage range and the preliminary experimental implementation and validation of the proposed SCA-inverter technique shows significant efficiency improvement.