Performance of isolated generating system with multilevel inverter using photovoltaic source

Solar PV is one of the demanding nonconventional sources for generation of electricity but it has its own limitation due to non-linear characteristics. Solar PV needs MPP tracker to extract maximum power form solar PV source. Furthermore, multilevel voltage source inverter (VSI) is used for converting dc voltage into closed to sinusoidal ac supply. In this paper, incremental conductance (IC) technique for tracking maximum solar power is proposed with five-level VSI for converting solar PV dc voltage into three phase ac output voltage. Moreover, a unipolar PWM technique is proposed for VSI to producing gating pulses for Insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) used in the VSI. Multilevel inverter is used to reduce filtering requirements and to reduce amplitude of all harmonics in inverter output. The complete model is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK and extensive simulations are carried out to validate the proposed system.