Flying Capacitor Inverter Integration in a Renewable Energy System

Abstract

This chapter presents a three-cell flying capacitor converter photovoltaic (PV) system. This system consists of a DC-DC boost power converter connected in series with a multicell inverter. The perturb and observe MPPT technique has been used to extract the maximum power from the solar panel and generate the duty signal to control the switch of the DC-DC converter. The three-cell flying capacitor inverter ensures the conversion of the output voltage of the boost chopper to the alternative voltage. This topology is made up of hybrid association of commutation cells, which makes it possible to share the voltage constraint on several switches. A closed loop control based on PWM has been proposed to control the capacitor voltages of the inverter. The output current is controlled using a PI regulator. The aim of the proposed three cell inverter is to produce an approximate sinusoidal output current with a very low THD. The simulation results assess the effectiveness of the control.