A New Design Method for the Passive Damped LCL and LLCL Filter-Based Single-Phase Grid-Tied Inverter

A higher order passive power filter (LLCL filter) for the grid-tied inverter is becoming attractive for industrial applications due to the possibility to reduce the cost of the copper and the magnetic material. However, similar to the conventional LCL filter, the grid-tied inverter is facing control challenges. An active or a passive damping measure can be adopted to suppress the possible resonances between the grid and the inverter. For an application with a stiff grid, a passive damping method is often preferred for its simpleness and low cost. This paper introduces a new passive damping scheme with low power loss for the LLCL filter. Also, a simple engineering design criterion is proposed to find the optimized damping resistor value, which is both effective for the LCL filter and the LLCL filter. The control analysis and the power loss comparison for different filter cases are given. All these are verified through the experiments on a 2-kW single-phase grid-tied inverter prototype using proportional resonant controllers. It is concluded that, compared with the LCL filter, the proposed passive damped LLCL filter can not only save the total filter inductance and reduce the volume of the filter but also reduce the damping power losses for a stiff grid application.