A novel high-performance utility-interactive photovoltaic inverter system

This paper presents a novel photovoltaic inverter that can not only synchronize a sinusoidal ac output current with a utility line voltage, but also control the power generation of each photovoltaic module in an array. The proposed inverter system is composed of a half-bridge inverter at the utility interface and a novel generation control circuit which compensates for reductions in the output power of the system that are attributable to variations in the generation conditions of respective photovoltaic modules. The generation control circuit allows each photovoltaic module to operate independently at peak capacity, simply by detecting the output power of the system. Furthermore, the generation control circuit attenuates low-frequency ripple voltage, which is caused by the half-bridge inverter, across the photovoltaic modules. Consequently, the output power of system is increased due to the increase in average power generated by the photovoltaic modules. The effectiveness of the proposed inverter system is confirmed experimentally and by means of simulation. Index Terms--Maximum power point tracking control, photovoltaic module, photovoltaic power generation, utility interactive inverters.