H6 Transformerless Full-Bridge PV Grid-Tied Inverters

Transformerless inverters are widely used in grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) generation systems, due to the benefits of achieving high efficiency and low cost. Various transformerless inverter topologies have been proposed to meet the safety requirement of leakage currents, such as specified in the VDE-4105 standard. In this paper, a family of H6 transformerless inverter topologies with low leakage currents is proposed, and the intrinsic relationship between H5 topology, highly efficient and reliable inverter concept (HERIC) topology, and the proposed H6 topology has been discussed as well. One of the proposed H6 inverter topologies is taken as an example for detail analysis with operation modes and modulation strategy. The power losses and power device costs are compared among the H5, the HERIC, and the proposed H6 topologies. A universal prototype is built for these three topologies mentioned for evaluating their performances in terms of power efficiency and leakage currents characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed H6 topology and the HERIC achieve similar performance in leakage currents, which is slightly worse than that of the H5 topology, but it features higher efficiency than that of H5 topology.