Performance analysis of grid interactive single-phase solar powered fault tolerant cascaded inverter

Abstract

Grid integration of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems is becoming popular recently due to the merits of stable support to conventional grid, limiting global warming and reduced emissions. However, maintaining capacitor voltage balancing, unity power factor, sinusoidal grid current and harmonic profile improvement are the challenging tasks owing to change in irradiation conditions. Multi-level inverters in grid connected systems will enhance the power quality of the system in terms of voltage and current total harmonic distortion. This paper proposes a highly reliable, robust and modular single phase solar PV fed fault tolerant hybrid cascaded H-bridge inverter with individual voltage/current control strategy for grid integration. Higher reliability and modularity, power factor correction, able to with stand without degrading the performance of the topology even under faulted conditions and harmonic profile improvement are the main objectives of the proposed system. The proposed system has been simulated and validated with experimental results on the developed prototype for different irradiation conditions and tested the performance of the topology with creation of faults on different modules at different times.