The proliferation of renewable energy in all parts of the modern grid have led to a tremendous growth in the power electronics related content and activities in the recent years. While many of the topologies used for PV inverters have a lot in common with the traditional ac-dc or dc-dc power conversion, there are many unique aspects of the PV inverter design that mainstream power converter designers are less familiar with.
The motivation for this seminar is to demystify the design aspects of the PV inverters in a structured manner. A brief inverter architecture overview kicks off the seminar, followed by introduction to PV panel electrical characteristics. Next, each stage of the PV inverter is fully explained in terms of system requirements, power stage implementations and control methodology – power pole concept and cycle-by-cycle averaging (CCA) are employed to simplify and standardize the operating modes analysis. Specific requirements pertinent to the PV inverter design such as MPPT, grid synchronization and islanding detection are addressed. Finally, advanced topics, including 3-phase inverter design and grid-forming inverters are covered in detail.
