Grid Connected Multilevel Inverter for Renewable Energy Applications

Electrical energy generation from renewable energy sources such as sun, wind etc., are widely adopted due to the increase in electricity consumption. The integration of renewable energy sources with the grid plays an important role in energy utilization. It is difficult to utilize electricity from renewable energy sources directly for the injection of power into the grid. Hence the system needs power electronic converters as an interface between renewable energy sources and grid/load. This paper discusses about the integration of three phase six level voltage source inverter into the grid. Three phase 2000 VA inverter is designed by using three, single phase eight switch six level inverters (in quarter cycle) and each single phase inverter uses three DC voltage sources which can be derived from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and fuel cell. The pure sinusoidal 415V three phase voltage is obtained from inverter to inject the power into grid and to the three phase resistive load. The proposed three phase Multi Level Inverter (MLI) is compared with the conventional three phase inverter and the observed THD of the conventional MLI is 31%. THD of the proposed MLI output voltage is analyzed which is 0.13% and found to be very less compared to six and 12 pulse conventional converter topologies. The simulation on the proposed inverter topology is done in MATLAB/Simulink and the results are verified. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.