Design and Control of a Grid-connected Seven Level Inverter for Photovoltaic Applications

This paper presents the design and closed-loop current control of a grid connected seven-level, 3-phase diode-clamped multilevel inverter for Photovoltaic (PV) applications. The proposed closed loop current control technique is based on the voltage-oriented proportional integral (PI) controller theory. The modulation technique used is level-shifted-carrier sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM). The gain values of PI controller were selected to achieve good current quality and dynamic response. Grid synchronization was achieved by using a synchronous-reference frame phase-locked loop (SRF-PLL). Matlab/Simulink was used for the control system design and simulation. The simulation results show that a 1.34% total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output current was achieved which is within the allowable current distortion limits by international standards. The stability of the system was analyzed using pole-zero mapping and root locus.