New Control Method for Power Decoupling of Electrolytic Capacitor-less Photovoltaic Micro-Inverter with Primary Side Regulation

Abstract

This paper presents a novel power decoupling control scheme with the bidirectional buckboost converter for primary-side regulation photovoltaic (PV) micro-inverter. With the proposed power decoupling control scheme, small-capacitance film capacitors are used to overcome the life-span and reliability limitations of the large-capacitance electrolytic capacitors. Then, an improved flyback PV inverter is employed in continuous conduction mode with primary-side regulation for the PV power conditioning. The proposed power-decoupling controller shares the reference for primary side current regulation of the flyback PV inverter. The decoupling controller shapes the input current of the bidirectional buck-boost converter. The shared reference eliminates the phase-delay between the input current to the bidirectional buck-boost converter and the double frequency current at the PV primary current. The elimination of the phase-delay in dynamic response enhances the ripple rejection capability of the power decoupling buck-boost converter even with small film capacitor. With proposed power decoupling control scheme, the additional advantage of the primary-side regulation of flyback PV inverter is that there is no need to have an extra current sensor for obtaining the ripplecurrent reference of the decoupling current-controller of the power-decoupling buck-boost converter. Therefore, the proposed power decoupling control scheme is cost-effective as well as the size benefit. A new transient analysis is carried out which includes the source voltage dynamics instead of considering the source voltage as a pure voltage source. For verification of the proposed control scheme, simulation and experimental results are presented.