Executive Summary : | Today, electricity is considered one of the basic amenities of life, apart from ‘food, clothing, and shelter'. Lack of electricity is considered a factor that can hinder human growth. The massive use of fossil fuels for electricity generation leads to significant greenhouse effects and pollutants in the air, which have a negative environmental impact. So, there has been an increase in demand for clean energy sources. Also, there is a mismatch between the availability of fossil fuels and global energy consumption. This results in high prices for oil and natural gas. The solution to all these problems is renewable energy. Among all renewable energy sources, solar power sources are one of the world's most prominent participants in the global energy portfolio and are to become the largest contributors to the production of electricity by the year 2040. Photovoltaic systems can be regarded as an extremely good source of electricity among renewable energy sources. The solar system produces DC power as an output. To utilise this DC electricity, an inverter is necessary to convert it to AC power. Improving the output waveform of the inverter is desirable as it helps in reducing the harmonic content of the current that is injected into the grid in the case of grid-integration. A multi-level inverter is being considered for this purpose. Multi-level inverters help in reducing electromagnetic interference and filter dimensions. A reduced components switched capacitor based multi-level inverter topology can achieve a high quality waveform for the grid-connected or standalone photovoltaic system. As the name suggests, this topology uses a lesser number of power semiconductor switches as compared to the traditional multi-level inverters for the generation of higher output voltage levels with lower overall harmonic distortion, less electromagnetic interference, lower voltage stress across switches, lower cost in filtering requirements, and many other additional benefits. A sinusoidal pulse width modulation technique is used for the generation of the switching pulses for the switched-capacitor based boosting inverter. The maximum power point tracking controller, along with the DC-DC converter, provides the maximum possible power from the PV panel at a sufficiently high voltage to the multilevel inverter. So, the switched-capacitor based boosting inverter topology should work well enough for the grid connection in the photovoltaic system. |