A novel High-Performance Utility-Interactive Photovoltaic Inverter System

Abstract—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 reduc-tions 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 de-tecting the output power of the system. Furthermore, the genera-tion control circuit attenuates low-frequency ripple voltage, which is caused by the half-bridge inverter, across the photovoltaic mod-ules. Consequently, the output power of system is increased due to the increase in average power generated by the photovoltaic mod-ules. The effectiveness of the proposed inverter system is confirmed experimentally and by means of simulation. Index Terms—Maximum power point tracking control, photo-voltaic module, photovoltaic power generation, utility interactive inverters. I