240$^\circ$-Clamped PWM Applied to Transformerless Grid Connected PV Converters With Reduced Common Mode Voltage and Superior Performance Metrics

Transformerless voltage source inverters (VSIs) are one of the popular topologies for photovoltaic (PV) grid-connected applications due to the lowest component count and simple design. Because of the absence of galvanic isolation in such systems, problem of electromagnetic interference (EMI) due to high leakage current is highly pronounced. Recently various reduced common mode voltage (CMV) PWM (RCMV-PWM) methods which address these issues of CMV, and leakage current have been proposed. These schemes typically function at the expense of increased total harmonic distortion (THD), higher switching loss, high DC link current stress along with limited modulation index range. In this work, 240
$^\circ$
clamped PWM (240CPWM) is selected as an ideal candidate for grid connected VSIs in terms of all round performance of switching loss, THD, DC link current stress, CMV and leakage current. 240CPWM is a relatively new space vector based PWM method which can attain much superior performance by avoiding the zero states. After a brief overview of the 240CPWM concept, the paper provides a detailed comparison of 240CPWM with conventional space vector PWM (CSVPWM) and discontinuous PWM (DPWM1) methods in terms of each of the above metrics. A 3-phase 208 V 3 kW silicon IGBT based hardware prototype is built to validate the performance of 240CPWM and compared with other popular schemes under grid-connected mode. Experimental results show a 66.7% reduction in the peak CMV and 50% reduction in leakage current with the proposed scheme as compared to CSVPWM. Also, THD, DC link current stress and inverter switching loss are greatly reduced as an added advantage using the proposed method. A new, combined performance index is proposed to compare the performance of different PWM schemes, and it is shown that the 240CPWM achieves the best value for this index among the PWM methods studied.