Grid Integration of an Enhanced Packed E-Cell Inverter for Renewable Energy Applications

This paper presents a grid-integrated multilevel inverter based on Packed E-Cell (PEC) structure for connecting renewable energy sources to the existing power grids. This dual source topology benefits from low number of semiconductor devices, simple robust control strategy, and smooth current of the capacitors. The shunt-capacitors of the converter are charged or discharged simultaneously to a quarter of the input DC source via horizontally extension design of the circuit. Thus, by applying only one voltage sensor and simple phase disposition pulse width modulation approach (PD-PWM), the operation of the inverter to generate 17-levels for the output voltage is ensured. For improving the dynamic performance of the converter, a closed-loop controller is designed and a precise mathematical analysis is presented as well. Accurate performance of the proposed structure is assessed by calculating theoretical analyses and simulating the inverter in MATLAB Environment.