THD Analysis for PV Based Cascaded Multilevel Inverters with MPPT Technique

Abstract

Due to the shortage of fossil fuels and environmental reasons caused by conventional power generation, photovoltaic energy integrated with multilevel inverters has gained popularity. This work presents a comparative analysis of a 5-level and 7-level cascaded H-bridge multi level inverter (CHB-MLI) integrated with photovoltaic (PV) system. The voltage output of a PV array varies with changes in atmospheric temperature and irradiation. Therefore, (Perturb and Observe) P&O maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control technique with boost converter is used in this work to extract the maximum voltage from PV array. To improve the performance quality in term of total harmonic distortion (THD) and switching losses, genetic algorithm (GA) based selected harmonic elimination pulse width modulation SHE-PWM technique is used to control the firing angles of PV based 5-level and 7-level CHB-MLI. The comparative results are obtained using MATLAB/ SIMULINK software.