Three phase inverter with reduced number of switches for renewable energy sources in microgrid

Inverters designed using reduced number of semiconductor switches are of great importance to the industry because of their lower cost and enhanced reliability linked to their less complex gating and control circuitries [1]. In this paper a four switch three phase (b-4) topology for the grid connected application in an effort to reduce the cost of the inverter is investigated. This topology warrants higher voltage ratings of the semiconductor devices used and the dc-link split capacitors used with respect to a conventional six switch three phase b-6 topology inverter for a specific set of grid voltages. In this paper, application of four power semiconductor switch based three phase inverter is proposed for renewable energy based three phase micro grid interconnection. The b-4 of three phase inverter topology is studied to make the commercial micro grid system to be cost effective and hardware optimized. Switching of four switches is controlled by a simple Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation is used to control the switching of the four switches. Main advantage of this converter is that it needs only four switches. Due to the reduction in number of switches system is less costlier and also the complexity in associated with gating and control circuitry is reduced.