Novel Design and Simulation of HERIC Transformerless PV Inverter in MATLAB/Simulink

High conversion efficiency and improved safety standards are the key performance parameters analyzed by any photovoltaic (PV) inverter manufacturing company before embarking on full scale commercial production. Several inverter topologies have been proposed by different researchers in a bid to find a highly efficient topology that matches with the various grid codes. In recent years, the attention of the manufacturers has shifted to the transformerless PV inverters which have reduced weight, size and cost compared to the conventional inverter types. However, the substitution comes with new challenges of leakage current through the parasitic capacitance to the ground, which in turn affects it efficiency. Thus, many researches are ongoing to overcome these challenges while improving the inverters efficiency. The Highly Efficient and Reliable Inverter Concept (HERIC) is one of the proposed topologies. Therefore, this study focused on novel design and simulation of the HERIC transformerless PV inverter in MATLAB to determine its leakage current mitigation ability and improved performance efficiency. It was found out that, the topology is good in stabilizing the common-mode voltage of the highly fluctuations frequency, thus minimize the ground leakage current through the parasitic capacitance while at the same time keeping very high efficiency.