Abstract

This work deals with the design of a three-phase grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) cascade H-bridge inverter for distributed power conversion. The power balancing among the phases must be properly addressed. In fact, an intra-phase power imbalance—arising from uneven irradiance and temperature conditions—generates a per-phase power imbalance. This latter can be compensated by the injection of a proper zero-sequence voltage, while the intra-phase balance is ensured by means of a hybrid modulation method which is able to guarantee the handling of unequal DC (Direct Current) sources, stable circuit operation, and maximization of PV power production. The digital controller is developed and tested in Matlab/Simulink environment integrated with XSG (Xilinx System Generator), thus allowing an easy transfer on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform and accurately describing the behavior of a real hardware implementation. Thus, numerical results have been considered to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach. View Full-Text