Improved control for grid-tie single-phase multilevel inverter under partial shading

Abstract

The growing interest for low power grid-tied photovoltaic systems motivates solution improvements to ensure maximum efficiency to the distributed generation process. This can be seen as a way to reduce the cost of energy production. This paper contributes to achieve an efficient and flexible solution to control a photovoltaic array by using a cascaded single-phase H-Bridge inverter. Improvement of a control strategy that ensures maximum power extraction from each H-Bridge subsystem is presented through Simulink simulations. Preliminary results will be presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed distributed processing solution.