Development of a grid connected photovoltaic power conditioning system based on flying capacitors inverter

In an effort to utilize the solar energy effectively through power electronics converters (conditioners), a great deal of research is being carried out to meet the increasing demand for load. This paper proposes an experimental photovoltaic (PV) power conditioning system with line connection. The conditioner consists of a flying capacitors multi-cell inverter fed by a dc-dc boost converter. The boost converter is designed to step-up the PV voltage to the stable required dc level without storage elements as battery. A weighted predictive controller is proposed to control the grid line current with unity power factor (PF) and extract the maximum power from the PV solar panel. Experimental results carried out using a 1 kW prototype show high performance of the proposed design with a total harmonic distortion (THD) of 2.27%.