Analysis of the Modulation Strategy for the Minimization of the Leakage Current in the PV Grid-Connected Cascaded Multilevel Inverter

This paper presents a pulse width modulation (PWM) technique for the minimization of the leakage current in the grid-connected/stand-alone transformerless photovoltaic (PV)-cascaded multilevel inverter (CMLI). The proposed PWM technique is integrated with the MPPT algorithm and is applied to the five-level CMLI. Furthermore, using the proposed PWM technique the high-frequency voltage transitions in the terminal and common mode voltages are minimized. Thus, the proposed PWM technique minimizes the leakage current of the PV array and electromagnetic interference filter requirement in the system without addition of any extra switches. Furthermore, this paper also presents the analysis for the terminal voltage across the PV array and the common mode voltage of the inverter based on the switching function. Using the given analysis, the effect of the PWM technique can be analyzed, as it directly links the switching function with the common mode voltage and leakage current. Also, the proposed PWM technique requires reduced number of carrier waves compared to the conventional sinusoidal pulse width modulation technique for the given CMLI. Complete details of the working principle and analysis with the support of simulation and experimental results of the proposed PWM technique are presented in this paper.