A Five-Level PWM Inverter for Hybrid PV/Fuel Cell/Battery Standalone Power System

Renewable energy sources (RES) has found attention of power system researchers as alternate energy sources recently. On the other hand RES based generation has emerged as one of the best option due to global environmental concerns, especially for off-grid load locations like islands, mountains, etc., where diesel generators are main source of power generation. This paper presents an efficient photovoltaic (PV) generation integrated with multilevel inverter to ensure regulated power at user end. In order to track the maximum power of PV applications Perturb and observe (PO) algorithm is used which is based on the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) principle. However in PV based power generation, control problems surfaces because of large variation in irradiance round the clock. This issue is controlled by hybrid PV generation system which is application of secondary power source as battery and fuel cell integrated with PV generation unit. The DC output of standalone hybrid PV-SOFC-Battery generation system is inverted by a single-phase multilevel converter. This output of developed standalone hybrid PV-SOFC-Battery generation system is used to supply the singlephase load. The results have been verified with MATLAB/Simulink for different load applications.