Two Stage Five Level Inverter for Grid Connected Application

Modern trend in power generation is the use of two-stage configuration i.e., allocating a single PV cell to a converter to produce grid voltage of adequate requirement and then to convert DC to AC voltage for grid cnnection. Usually, the first stage is a DC-DC boost type converter which is responsible for extracting maximum power from panel and boosting PV voltage to a value higher than peak of grid voltage. A converter is proposed, which is derived from an active network based converter, is chosen as the first stage and a five level inverter is used as the second stage of the configuration. Thus, in overall, the converter used is having high gain and reduced switching stress. The Inverter used is having the advantage of low filter requirement, reduced stress, EMI and reduced THD level. A closed loop control of the converter is done to maintain constant output voltage under varying input voltage. MATLAB R2014a version software is used to simulate the model. The prototype of the two stage configuration was developed and tested in the laboratory and results were verified using PIC 16F877A.