Efficiency and Current Harmonics Comparison Between SiC and Si Based Inverters for Microgrids

Abstract With the expanding power demands and increasing use of renewable energy resources, microgrids have been widely supported. The wide bandgap semiconductor devices with higher blocking voltage capabilities and higher switching speed such as silicon carbide (SiC) devices will become a critical component in building the microgrid. In this paper, the power loss and current harmonics of both Si-IGBT and SiC-MOSFET based inverters are investigated and compared in low voltage (LV) microgrid applications, respectively. And the experimental results show that the application of SiC devices greatly increases the energy efficiency and improves the power quality in microgrid.