Performance Evaluation of Solar Energy Conversion System Having Seven-level Cascaded H-bridge Inverter

Abstract

This paper presents solar energy conversion system having distributed MPPT controller and cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter. The availability of multiunit dc voltage source and its control makes the cascaded multilevel inverter most suitable one. The single-phase output of the inverter is integrated to grid. Distributed MPPT control is incorporated with each PV panel to extract the optimum power from solar panel. For smooth switching operation of H-bridge inverter Sinusoidal Pulse width Modulation (SPWM) technique is used. As solar radiation is variant in nature the performance of the overall system is evaluated for both steady and dynamic environmental conditions. MATLAB/Simulink platform is used to validate the proposed scheme along with their THD analysis. It is found that the proposed scheme gives satisfactory performance and can be applied to real system under both normal and varying conditions.