A Hybrid Switching Technique for Single-Phase AC-Module PV System to Reduce Power Losses and Minimize THD

This paper proposes a hybrid switching technique for a domestic PV system with AC-module architecture. In this PV system, independent control of PV modules, which are directly connected to DC terminals of a single-phase cascaded multilevel inverter, makes module-level MPPT possible to extract maximum available solar energy, especially in partial shading conditions. As one of the main contributions, the proposed hybrid method employs a fundamental-based switching technique to decrease power losses, which directly affect the efficiency of solar energy conversion. In addition, fast dynamic response of the introduced hybrid technique lets the PV system to harvest more power in partial shading conditions. Producing a waveform with minimized THD in steady-state conditions is another advantage of the proposed switching technique. In this paper, the advantages of the proposed hybrid method are verified by the simulation of a test PV system with both conventional SPWM and proposed switching techniques in MATLAB/Simulink under various partial shading conditions.