Design and Development of a Low-Cost Grid Connected Solar Inverter for Maximum Solar Power Utilization

This paper presents a new solar inverter configuration to integrate maximum percentage of solar power to the grid. The proposed configuration consists of 2-Dimensional Lookup table-based maximum power tracking controller, modified dc-dc converter, and a simple inverter. 2-Dimensional Lookup table helps in extracting maximum amount of solar power and the converter transforms photovoltaic array voltage into dual independent output voltages (V1 and V2) with different magnitude. The inverter has two stages: in the first stage, Capacitor Selection (CS) circuit converts V1 and V2 voltages into three-level DC voltage and in the next stage inverted to seven level AC voltage by Full-Bridge (FB) converter. The proposed solar inverter configuration is experimentally validated and the obtained results are presented and discussed in details. From the presented results it confirms the superiority of the developed inverter.