System improvements of photovoltaic inverters with SiC-transistors

In this paper the system improvements of PV-inverters with SiC-transistors are demonstrated. The basic characteristics of engineering prototypes of normally-off SiC-JFETs and SiC-MOSFETs were measured and their differences in the application are considered. To demonstrate the improvement in PV-inverter performance, a 5 kW single-phase and a three-phase full bridge inverter with normally-off SiC-JFETs were developed at Fraunhofer ISE. Different switching frequencies up to 144 kHz were applied and the impact on production costs and inverter performance was rated under the aspects of an industrial product development. This means, the influences on the efficiency and power density. In this work, a world record in PV-inverter efficiency of 99 % was achieved in a single-phase inverter and for the three-pase inverter, the power density was tripled with respect to commercially available state of the art PV-inverters