High-Efficiency Power Conditioning System for Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Modules

This paper presents a high-efficiency power conditioning system (PCS) for grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) modules. The proposed PCS consists of a step-up DC-DC converter and a single-phase DC-AC inverter for the grid-connected PV modules. A soft-switching step-up DC-DC converter is proposed to generate a high DC-link voltage from the low PV module voltage with a high-efficiency. A DC-link voltage controller is presented for constant DC-link voltage regulation. A half-bridge inverter is used for the single-phase DC-AC inverter for grid connection. A grid current controller is suggested to supply PV electrical power to the power grid with a unity power factor. Experimental results are obtained from a 180 W grid-connected PV module system using the proposed PCS. The proposed PCS achieves a high power efficiency of 93.0 % with an unity power factor for a 60 Hz / 120 Vrms AC power grid.