A Current-Forced Line-Commutated Inverter for Single-Phase Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Generation Systems

Abstract

A simple power electronic interface based on the line-commutated inverter (LCI) has been developed in order to inject sinusoidal current to the grid for single-phase grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) energy generation systems. The proposed inverter facilitates controlling the injecting/grid current with a controllable power factor in contrast to the conventional LCI system. It is achieved that the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the injecting currents for the different firing angles/power factors and reference currents is about 5% or less than 5%. Thus, the grid-connected standards for injecting current are satisfied without filter equipment unlike the conventional LCI system. The proposed system has been built in MATLAB/Simulink and examined experimentally on PV array of 160 W. The simulation and experimental results are better performance than the conventional line-commutated inverter methods reported in the literature. The proposed LCI has a simple and robust structure, and it can be easily synchronized with grid thanks to self-latching property of SCRs. Therefore, it is a good alternative for the power transferring from PV panels to the utility grid in grid-connected PV systems.

Keywords

• inverter
• photovoltaic systems
• thyristor circuits
• total harmonic distortion