A new control scheme of a cascaded transformer type multilevel PWM inverter for a residential photovoltaic power conditioning system

From the viewpoint of high quality output voltage generation in a residential photovoltaic system, a multilevel inverter employing cascaded transformers can become a good substitute for the conventional pulse width modulated inverters and other multilevel counterparts. However, to obtain more sinusoidal output voltage waves, it should increase the number of switching devices and transformers resulting in a cost increase. To alleviate this problem, an efficient switching pattern is proposed and applied to a multilevel inverter equipped with two cascaded transformers, which have a series-connected secondary. Operational principle and analysis are illustrated focusing on a change of the switching pattern. High-performance of the proposed multilevel scheme embedded in a photovoltaic power conditioning system is verified by computer-aided simulations and experimental results. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved