Control of Power Inverters in Renewable Energy and Smart Grid Integration

7

Control of Inverter Output Impedance

The filter capacitor of an inverter can be regarded as a part of the load and, as a result, the output impedance of the inverter is inductive. Such inverters are referred to as L-inverters. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the output impedance of an inverter plays an important role in the THD of the output voltage. In this chapter, control strategies are presented to design the output impedance to be resistive and capacitive, respectively. The corresponding inverters are referred to as R-inverters and C-inverters. Moreover, it is shown that C-inverters can be designed to significantly improve the THD of the output voltage. Both simulation and experimental results are presented.

7.1 Inverters with Inductive Output Impedances (L-inverters)

The circuit of a single-phase inverter under consideration is shown in Figure 7.1(a). It consists of a single-phase H-bridge inverter powered by a DC source, and an LC filter. The inverter is connected to the AC bus via a circuit breaker CB and the load is assumed to be connected to the AC bus. The control signal u is converted to a PWM signal to drive the H-bridge so that the average of uf over a switching period is the same as u, i.e. . Hence, the PWM block and the H-bridge can be ignored in the controller design (Zhong 2012a).

Figure 7.1 Single-phase inverter

Although the inverter consists of an LC filter, ...