Grid-connected photovoltaic micro-inverter with new hybrid control LLC resonant converter

Abstract

A high-efficiency photovoltaic (PV) micro-inverter consisting of two power stages i.e. a LLC resonant converter with a new hybrid control scheme and a dc-ac inverter is proposed, studied and designed in this paper. In the first power stage, the new hybrid control combining pulse-frequency modulation (PFM) and phase-shift pulse-width modulation (PS-PWM) is employed on a full-bridge LLC dc-dc converter, in order to achieve high efficiency when PV output voltage varies in a wide range. Moreover, a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method based on power perturbation is implemented in the dc-ac inverter. Therefore, the complexity of regulating LLC converter can be reduced effectively, and efficiency optimal design can be carried out through the proposed designing procedure for the resonant tank of LLC converter. Finally, a prototype of the proposed PV micro-inverter (PVMI) is developed with rated power of 250W and output voltage of 220VAC/50Hz. The experiment shows that the peak efficiency of the PVMI is 95.5%, where efficiency of LLC converter is up to 97.7%, and the MPPT accuracy is more than 99%. Thus the validity of the proposed system structure, design and control method is verified.