Highly Efficient Microinverter With Soft-Switching Step-Up Converter and Single-Switch-Modulation Inverter

Abstract

This paper presents a novel microinverter for a single-phase grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system. The proposed microinverter consists of a step-up dc-dc converter using an active-clamp circuit with a series-resonant voltage doubler and a high-efficiency inverter with single-switch-modulation step-down converters. The active-clamp circuit provides zero-voltage switching (ZVS) turn-on, recycles the energy stored in the leakage inductance of the transformer, and limits switch voltage stress. Moreover, to remove the reverse-recovery problem of the rectifier diodes, a series-resonant voltage doubler is used. Thus, this whole process provides high efficiency. To improve efficiency and reliability in the proposed inverter, only a single switch is modulated at the switching frequency without a shoot-through problem. A modified controller is also adopted to achieve fast output control. Thus, the proposed PV microinverter has the structure to minimize power losses. The experimental results show a maximum efficiency of 96.2% for a 400-W microinverter.