HARMONICS MITIGATION OF P&O MPPT BASED SOLAR POWERED NEUTRAL POINT CLAMPED MULTILEVEL INVERTER

To supplement the power shortages, renewable energy sources are a promising source among the existing resources of energy out of which solar PV (photo voltaic) is most popular due to its significant advantages. Controlling the output of solar PV system and harmonics at the load end are key aspects. The main theme of this paper is to control output of solar PV system with MPPT (maximum power point tracking) and reduction of harmonics at the load end.In this paper, commercial solar arrays of 1.2 kW along with P&O (perturb and observe) MPPT to track maximum power has been interfaced with neutral point clamped multilevel inverter.Simulation has been done for different level with the aim to reduce THD (total harmonic distortion) at the load end. Modeling and simulation of solar PV system and DC-DC boost converter has been done using SIMSCAPE library of MATLAB and the output of Boost Converter has been interfaced with neutral point clamped multilevel inverter which has been modeled in SIMULINK library of MATLAB. The advantage of using SIMSCAPE library is that it models the system considering all the physical effects. The output of solar cell has been interfaced with the boost converter. Once the system is modeled in SIMSCAPE it can be easily implemented on hardware for real-time application