Improved Power Quality in an Innovative Bidirectional Inverter Topology

Abstract

The management of electricity consumption still represents a major issue, and particularly in individual housing mainly to find a good balance between production and consumption. Attention must be focused on the optimization of the cost of electricity consumption and, at the same time, the peak demand. Regarding a smart home management system, the inverter has a central role. Voltage and current bidirectional features are of utmost importance, specifically when an energy transfer is required from a storage system and the AC-grid, and vice versa. This article deals with an innovative bidirectional inverter topology based on sinusoidal waveforms from the generation of sine half-waves. The main challenges are both to improve the power quality of the output signals in terms of total harmonic distortion (THD), and minimize the complexity of the whole converter. Wide band-gap semiconductor devices (SiC MOSFETs) are used to optimize the efficiency of the DC-AC converter while minimizing its size and its weight. Many experimental measurements with low output power (lower than 1 kW) point out the relevance of this kind of topology.