Analysis on Performance of MCPWM Techniques for a Multilevel Inverter fed PV system

This paper focuses on control design of single-phase hexagonal switch cell multilevel inverter (HSCMLI) interconnected with photovoltaic (PV) array. The new hexagonal switch cell multilevel inverter uses a reduced number of power semiconductor devices as compared with conventional multilevel inverter (MLI) topologies. The proposed topology reduces the size, complexity and improves the reliability of the overall PV system. It can also generate 7, 9 and 11 level using only 7 switches. To improve the performance of the inverter output various multi-carrier pulse width modulation (MCPWM) techniques demonstrated successfully using MATLAB/Simulink environment to enhance the fundamental output voltage and total harmonic distortion (THD). The power extracted through the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique. A 3 KW hardware setup with two DC-DC boost converter has been proposed and tested using dSPACE DS 1103. The correct operation of the proposed topology shows that the carrier overlap technique offers better result compared to other MCPWM techniques.