Mitigation of Ground Leakage Current of Single-Phase PV Inverter Using Hybrid PWM with Soft Voltage Transition and Nonlinear Output Inductor

A single-phase transformerless full-bridge photovoltaic grid-tie inverter is presented. It utilizes 1) a virtual ground technique to mitigate ground leakage current, 2) a hybrid pulsewidth modulation (HPWM) scheme to profile the output current and prevent sudden changes in the common-mode voltage, and 3) a nonlinear output inductor to attenuate current ripple around zero crossings and minimize filter size. The HPWM is effectively the same as unipolar PWM (UPWM), but with soft voltage transition modulation introduced around the zero crossings. Apart from low switching losses, the output filter is implemented with a minimum number of components to achieve high attenuation of ripple current. By deriving the switching trajectory, a mathematical model is formulated, and the ground leakage current and the output current with the traditional UPWM and the proposed HPWM schemes are compared. The output current harmonics caused by the nonlinear output inductor is analyzed by the Volterra theory. A 340 W, 380 Vdc/110 V ac, 50 Hz prototype has been built and evaluated.