This paper proposes a method of designing and controlling a photovoltaic microinverter capable of power decoupling with only a small-capacity film capacitor. Existing photovoltaic microinverters use electrolytic capacitors to resolve the input/output ...
This paper proposes a method of designing and controlling a photovoltaic microinverter capable of power decoupling with only a small-capacity film capacitor. Existing photovoltaic microinverters use electrolytic capacitors to resolve the input/output power imbalance. However, the electrolytic capacitor has a problem of reducing its life due to its own loss due to current ripple and deterioration characteristics in a high-temperature environment. Therefore, removing the electrolytic capacitor of the microinverter can contribute to improving the life and reliability of the system. Therefore, various circuit structures and control methods have been proposed in existing studies to solve this problem. Among them, the capacitance was significantly reduced by dividing the ripple power borne by the capacitor through the decoupling power stage. However, there is a limitation that as the number of elements increases, losses and costs increase. Therefore, this paper proposes a design direction to replace the electrolytic capacitor with a film capacitor through the operation mode and control method of the circuit while maintaining the existing Two-Stage structure without adding a power stage.
In this paper, first, the capacitor required capacity and energy flow according to the power decoupling position were analyzed by comparing the existing single-stage structure with the two-stage structure, and a circuit structure advantageous for reducing the capacitor capacity was selected. After that, the effect of the DC-Link capacitor capacity reduction on the input current was analyzed, and the power decoupling effect according to the operation mode of the boost converter was compared and analyzed. Through this, a method of implementing PV-side power decoupling only by control and the operation mode of the proposed DC/DC stage without an additional circuit configuration was proposed. In the DC/AC stage, a control method was proposed to stably maintain the DC-Link voltage through a control strategy and to ensure the quality of the output current. Finally, simulations and experiments on 600W class prototypes were conducted. Through this, it was verified that a design and control plan for implementing a PV microinverter that can be decoupled with only a small film capacitor is presented.