A novel modulation method for reducing common mode voltage in three-phase inverters

Leakage current is originated from common-mode voltage (CMV) time variations in a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system and results in several deficiencies. In this paper, a new method is proposed for CMV reduction in a three-phase voltage source inverter (VSI) system. The proposed method is based on space vector modulation and it utilizes only odd and zero vectors. By using the proposed method, the number of fluctuations of the CMV waveform per switching cycle is reduced; therefore, the amount of high-frequency harmonics of CMV is decreased. In addition, because of applying both active and zero vectors by the proposed method, the total harmonic distortion becomes less than most of other reduced CMV (RCM) methods. The integrity of the method is confirmed by simulation of a 3.5kw three-phase system.