Fault Tolerant Inverter for Grid Connected Photovoltaic System

Abstract

With the increased focus on grid connected Photovoltaic (PV) systems, the reliability and stability of grid-connected inverters is a major area of interest. The occurrence of fault in any part of the inverter may severely impact the system leading to adverse effects at the grid end. To improve the system reliability, it is imperative to equip the system with fault tolerant scheme that can handle such failure conditions and prevents the system from shutting down. This paper proposes parallel inverter-based fault tolerant technique for single-phase grid-integrated PV Inverters. It realizes simple fault diagnostic technique for fault identification. After that faulty part is isolated and reconfiguration takes place. The proposed fault tolerant mechanism is validated by performing numerical simulations in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The simulation results verify the potential of the presented technique in dealing with fault conditions.