SVPWM Inverters for Photovoltaic Systems Applications

The utilization of solar energy through photovoltaic systems has become increasingly popular in both residential and commercial buildings. This expanding market for renewable energy has created a high demand for power electronics and modulation techniques. Among these techniques, space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) stands out as a vector-based approach to the traditional PWM technique employed in inverters for photovoltaic systems. In this paper the concept of SVPWM will be introduced and simulated in line with a full system description using PSIM. The simulated results reveal a better performance with lower percentage total harmonic distortion (%THD) when compared to PWM. The %THD has been reduced from 3.15% to 0.54% for RL when using SVPWM compared to sinusoidal PWM, and reduced from 3.4% to1.4% when using RLC load.