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Control and Design of Seven-Level Cascaded Multilevel Converter for Transformerless Large-Scale Photovoltaic Integration

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Abstract

In this work, the design and control of seven-level H-bridge multilevel converter are carried out for the grid integration of large photovoltaic (PV) system without bulky line frequency transformer, as the multilevel converter provides a direct integration to the medium voltage grid. This system is a single-stage system to reduce cost and control complexity. Its control uses a decoupled current control with synchronous reference frame (SRF) and phase locked loop (PLL) with low switching frequency phase-shifted pulse width modulation (PWM) technique. It reduces the switching losses and hence improves the efficiency. The outer loop of control comprises of a separate maximum power point technique (MPPT) controller for each PV array to overcome the unpredictable irradiance level variations, ambient temperature, shading effect and other relevant factors. The improved perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT algorithm is used to track the maximum power from the PV array to give the accurate results. A significant reduction in total harmonic distortion (THD) in the grid current because of the increased number of steps in output AC voltage waveform of multilevel converter and consequently reduction in size of the filter component are achieved. Simulative experiments are carried out in MATLAB/Simulink, and the performance is validated in accordance with the IEEE-519 standard.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Delhi Technological University, Main Bawana Road, New Delhi, Delhi, 110042, India

    Jyoti Kulkarni & Narendra Kumar

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Bhim Singh

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  1. Jyoti Kulkarni
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  2. Narendra Kumar
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  3. Bhim Singh
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Correspondence to Jyoti Kulkarni.

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Kulkarni, J., Kumar, N. & Singh, B. Control and Design of Seven-Level Cascaded Multilevel Converter for Transformerless Large-Scale Photovoltaic Integration. J. Inst. Eng. India Ser. B 101, 623–629 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40031-020-00472-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40031-020-00472-7

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