A Power Adaptive Control Strategy for Further Extending the Operation Range of Single-Phase Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel PV Inverter

With the characteristics of module-level maximum power point tracking, module-level monitoring, and panel shut-
off
, single-phase cascaded H-bridge (CHB) inverter has outstanding advantages applied to household photovoltaic (PV) power generation occasion. However, unbalanced output powers among PV panels is an inherent problem of single-phase CHB PV inverter, which will make the H-bridges (HBs) with higher powers overmodulation, resulting in deteriorated grid current and even system instability. Aiming at this issue, this article proposes a power adaptive control strategy, which divides system operation into three modes, and calculates modulation waveforms by using different methods in different modes. By flexibly adjusting the transmission power of HBs in different modes, all the HBs are able to avoid overmodulation, and single-phase CHB PV grid-connected inverter can still operate normally even if the maximum powers among PV panels are seriously unbalanced. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by simulation and experimental results.