Three-phase nine switch inverter for a grid-connected photovoltaic system

In this paper it is presented a three-phase nine switch inverter for a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system. The structure of this power converter is based on the classical three-phase voltage source inverter. However, it requires three extra bi-directional switches and presents a multilevel characteristic. Thus, reducing switching frequency and/or inverter ac voltages with reduced THD are obtained. To control this power converter a sliding mode controller associated to vectorial modulator is used. The performance of the proposed PV system is verified by time-domain simulation studies.