A family of non-isolated photovoltaic grid connected inverters without leakage current issues

Abstract

Transformerless solar inverters have a higher efficiency than those with an isolation link. However, they suffer from a leakage current issue. This paper proposes a family of single phase six-switch transformerless inverter topologies with an ac bypass circuit to solve the leakage current problem. These circuits embed two unidirectional freewheeling current units into the midpoint of a full bridge inverter, to obtain a freewheeling current path, which separates the solar panel from the grid in the freewheeling state. The freewheeling current path contains significantly fewer devices and poor performance body diodes are not involved, leading to a higher efficiency. Meanwhile, it is not necessary to add a voltage balancing control method when compared with the half bridge inverter. Simulation and experiments are provided to validate the proposed topologies.