Volume: 19 Issue-01 (January-June) 2024

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A MULTILEVEL INVERTER WITH GENERALISED HIGH GAIN FOR USE IN SMALL SOLAR POWER SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT

The energy industry is seeing a meteoric rise in the contribution of renewable energy sources, particularly small-scale solar photovoltaics (PV). It is common practice to use powerful DC-DC converters as front-end converters in order to raise the PV panels' low voltage. DC-AC converters, also known as multilevel inverters, are employed for either grid integration or freestanding AC loads. This study suggests a nine-level triple boost inverter design for small-scale photovoltaic (PV) applications in order to accomplish both goals without using the front-end converter. The suggested design makes use of a switched capacitor method to increase the voltage, and the capacitors self-balance their voltage. The suggested nine-level inverter is described in depth in this work, along with its functioning, stress estimations, loss analysis, and circuit parameter design. The research also includes details on a generalised multilevel inverter (MLI) architecture with a high gain. There is also a comparison with competing inverters in the current literature to show how the suggested MLI stacks up. Benefits of the suggested MLI architecture include an inherent ability to generate bipolar voltage, a decreased component count, and a low total standing voltage. An experimental prototype and simulations run in MATLAB confirm the suggested MLI topology's performance. We also show the experimental findings considering the effects of changing the load, modulation index, and output frequency.

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