Novel Design of Cascaded Multilevel Inverter with Reduced THD for Solar Applications

The consumption of fossil fuels is at higher rate, but fossil fuels are non-renewable energy sources will not be available forever, they will not satisfy our demands for longer period and also they are not eco friendly. Hence renewable energy sources are gaining more importance in generating power, particularly solar energy because, this solar energy is available in abundance from sun and also pollution free. Photovoltaic Cells (PV) are used to generate electricity from sun light, the power generated in DC form from PV cell is fed to DC-DC converter. The DC-DC converter will increase the voltage to a particular level, the output of DC-DC converter is given to input of inverter, which will supply power to AC applications. Hence inverter plays a very important role in supplying good quality of power for AC applications. Multilevel Inverters (MLI) are used to produce fine quality of AC power since, in MLI as number of output levels increases Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) decreases. The proposed cascaded asymmetrical MLI circuit consists of 15 switches, used for power conversion with 100 output levels. The THD of proposed MLI circuit is just 3.79%, and this is an asymmetrical type of MLI. Simulation of proposed circuit is performed using MATLAB/SIMULINK.