A Family of Neutral Point Clamped Full-Bridge Topologies for Transformerless Photovoltaic Grid-Tied Inverters

Transformerless inverter topologies have attracted more attentions in photovoltaic (PV) generation system since they feature high efficiency and low cost. In order to meet the safety requirement for transformerless grid-tied PV inverters, the leakage current has to be tackled carefully. Neutral point clamped (NPC) topology is an effective way to eliminate the leakage current. In this paper, two types of basic switching cells, the positive neutral point clamped cell and the negative neutral point clamped cell, are proposed to build NPC topologies, with a systematic method of topology generation given. A family of single-phase transformerless full-bridge topologies with low-leakage current for PV grid-tied NPC inverters is derived including the existing oH5 and some new topologies. A novel positive–negative NPC (PN-NPC) topology is analyzed in detail with operational modes and modulation strategy given. The power losses are compared among the oH5, the full-bridge inverter with dc bypass (FB-DCBP) topology, and the proposed PN-NPC topologies. A universal prototype for these three NPC-type topologies mentioned is built to evaluate the topologies at conversion efficiency and the leakage current characteristic. The PN-NPC topology proposed exhibits similar leakage current with the FB-DCBP, which is lower than that of the oH5 topology, and features higher efficiency than both the oH5 and the FB-DCBP topologies.