1-MW Solar Power Conditioning System with Boost Converter using all-SiC Power Module

Abstract:
Recently, the market of the PV power plant is growing up in the Asian market. In the PV power plant, typically, an inverter which has the rated power of few hundreds kVA is applied to feed the power to the grid. A 1-MW solar power inverter which employs all SiC Power Modules has been developed. The developed solar power inverter consists of two conversion stages, first stage is a boost converter and second stage is a T-type NPC inverter. A chopper module in the boost converter is configured with SiC-based MOSFETs and Schottky Barrier Diodes, and 48 chopper modules are used in parallel. Each chopper module is controlled individually. The T-type NPC inverter stage is configured with Si-based IGBTs and RB-IGBTs. In this paper, a 1-MW solar power inverter with SiC-based boost converters has been developed for so-lar power plants at a few MW to a few 10 MW. The boost converter uses all SiC power modules including MOSFET and Schotckey diode. The inverter enables maximum efficiency at 98.8 %. The switching waveforms of the MOSFET used in the boost converter and efficiency curves according to the DC input voltage are presented.