A New Symmetrical Five Level Multilevel Inverter Topology for Standalone Solar PV Based System

Abstract

The world is marching towards net zero carbon emissions, as a result the use of solar photo voltaic (PV) applications are widely increased. In order to increase the efficiency of solar PV inverters, the multilevel inverters are being employed. The conventional multilevel inverters use more number of switches which may reduce the reliability of the system. To mitigate these issues, reduced switch multilevel inverters are used. In this paper, a novel five level five switch symmetrical multilevel inverter (MLI) suitable for applications of renewable energy is proposed with reduced harmonics, reduced losses and improved efficiency. The proposed topology is designed to generate output voltage with five levels using two voltage sources and 5 switches (4 unidirectional, 1 bi-directional). By varying inputs of the system and processing the data with artificial neural network, the optimum values are obtained to generate gate signals for the switch. The loss analysis model of the proposed multilevel inverter using sinusoidal pulse width modulation technique is designed and simulated in piecewise linear electrical circuit simulation (PLECS). The proposed multilevel inverter is employed for standalone solar PV system. A hardware prototype of the proposed symmetrical five level multilevel inverter for standalone solar PV system is developed to verify the simulation results using DSPACE-1202 controller are presented.