Objective
Using PV electrical power, demands for most applications a transformation of th e DC-energy source into a more conventional 230V AC output form. For PV-systems operating in a grid connected installation the presence of a DC/AC inverter is evidently a necessity. The inverter must not only operate with a very high eff iciency and being very reliable, but must also have a reasonable price. Howe ver, due to the relative low production quantities of PV-inverters, the develop ment cost per inverter unit is rather important. Especially for relative low po wer (1-2kW) installations, the cost of the inverter takes an important part in the total PV-installation budget. To produce inverters with lower prices, not o nly development cost has to come down, but also an important reduction of the c omponent count is necessary and this without affecting the efficiency. This proposal is written as a result of combining two successful judged Exploratory Awards, both in the photovoltaic inverter domain. The first Award describes a way to cut down the cost of a photovoltaic inverter by replacing the PWM cont rol and the feed-back loop by a full digital circuit having a minimum component count. The second Award proposes a very high efficiency inverter based on the well known stair step topology, but extended with one PWM (pulse width modulati on) stage. By replacing the hard switch of one cell by a PWM stage, that swit ches more smoothly, the output distortion due to the steps in the wave form can be eliminated. The aim of this proposal is to develop and apply the proposed P WM principle of the first Award on the topology of the second Award, resulting in an inverter technique that has both advantages: low cost and high efficiency . Inverters often use PWM to convert the energy. Controlling the PWM is perf ormed by combination of analogue and digital circuits, implementing feed-back l oops to assure the desired inverter sine wave output current and to track the P V-panel in its maximum power point (MPP). When all digital and analogue circ uitry could be replaced by one digital control unit generating directly the PWM control signal in real time, the component count of the inverter control part could be drastically go down. Until now, however, the algorithm is too complex (3th order system) to calculate in real time by limited pieces of electronics.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CRS - Cooperative research contractsCoordinator
4020 Liège
Belgium