Efficiency Improvement of Grid-Tied Inverters at Low Input Power Using Pulse-Skipping Control Strategy

A pulse-skipping control strategy is proposed to improve efficiency of grid-tied inverters at light loads. To maximize the efficiency of pulse-skipping operation mode, three key parameters are identified and optimized based on a loss model, which is developed to find the maximal efficiency points using a 3-D search technique. A 200-W prototype inverter was setup to verify the proposed control strategy. The experimental results show that the proposed pulse-skipping control strategy greatly improves the inverter's efficiency at light loads and match the simulation results fairly well, thus, validating the proposed optimization method for pulse-skipping operation.