Transformerless photovoltaic inverters with leakage current and pulsating power elimination

This paper presents a transformerless inverter topology, which is capable of simultaneously solving leakage current and pulsating power issues in grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems. Without adding any additional components to the system, the leakage current caused by the PV-to-ground parasitic capacitance can be bypassed by introducing a common mode (CM) conducting path to the inverter. The resulting ground leakage current is therefore well controlled to be below the regulation limit. Moreover, the proposed inverter can also eliminate the well-known double line frequency pulsating power that is inherent in single-phase PV systems. By properly injecting CM voltages to the output filter capacitors, the pulsating power can be decoupled from the dc-link. Therefore, it is possible to use long lifetime film capacitors instead of electrolytic capacitors to improve the reliability of the PV system. The mechanism of leakage current suppression and the closed-loop control of pulsating power decoupling are discussed in the paper in details. A 500 W prototype was also built and tested in the laboratory, and both simulation and experimental results are finally presented to show the excellent performance of the proposed PV inverter.