Grid-Tied Packed E-Cell Inverter with Active Capacitor Voltage Balancing

This paper proposed a PI based control technique for grid-tied application of recent introduced compact multilevel inverter so called as Packed E-Cell. The nine-level Packed E-Cell (PEC9) benefits the advantage of single auxiliary and main dc source where the dc capacitors are placed in a horizontal extension on the single auxiliary dc link where simultaneous charging and discharging with effective redundant switching states are provided. Therefore, PEC9 is an active capacitor voltage-balancing converter where the capacitors voltages are adjusted to the right amplitude using only redundant switching states. Thanks to this prominent advantage, PEC9 is an appropriate nine-level topology for grid-tied inverter as the capacitors voltages are not required to be involved in grid-tied control technique. Therefore, it was shown that PEC9 inverter can be perfectly controlled with a simple PI technique for grid-tied configuration. The proposed PI-based technique has been tested using Matlab-Simulink on grid-tied PEC9 inverter under both steady-state and dynamical operation.