A high efficiency single-phase multilevel packed U cell inverter for photovoltaic applications

PV systems have the drawbacks of high initial cost. The power electronics portions represents about 50% of this cost for no-battery systems. Therefore, it is important to act to decrease this cost through designing a power conditioning circuit with lower cost. This paper proposes implementation of economic and efficient multilevel inverter for PV applications. Packed U Cell (PUC) multilevel inverter is employed as a competitive converter with minimum components compared to the existing ones. Boost DC-DC converter is designed to extract the maximum power point using P&O algorithm. Only six switches and single DC source (PV) are used to deliver a better power quality output in terms of number of voltage levels, low THD, small output filter. Simulink and experimental prototype are built to investigate the effectiveness of this topology. Results show a good matching.