Using IGBT power switches 500W solar inverter design

Green energy development in the global trend, more and more household appliances, lighting equipment, power tools, uninterruptible power systems (UPS), and other industrial equipment began to use solar power, solar energy will be converted to the desired alternating current (AC ) or direct current (DC) voltage.

For the high efficiency of these devices produce the required voltage and current, solar power inverter requires the right combination of controller, driver and output power devices. This article discusses this DC to AC inverter design, specifically for 500W Power, 120V and 60Hz frequency single-phase sine wave output is optimized. This design 200V DC input can be connected to the solar array panels a DC / DC voltage converter generates.

For such applications a variety of advanced power devices can be used, such as MOSFET, bipolar junction transistors (BJT) and IGBT. However, in order to obtain the best conversion efficiency and performance of the solar inverter to select the correct power transistor challenging and very time consuming. Over the years studies have shown that, IGBT power devices can provide more than other advantages, including greater current handling capability, with a voltage (rather than current) easily achieve the gate control, and integrated in the package ultra-fast recovery diode achieve faster turn-off time.

IGBT is a minority carrier device, it is the off-time of minority carriers depending on the speed of re-combination, therefore, with the recent technology and improved device structure, its switching characteristics have been significantly enhanced. In addition, IGBT conduction with high performance and a wide safe operating area (SOA), the work is very stable. Based on these fundamental advantages, this article describes the use of this power inverter IGBT power switches.

Since power wind inverter generally use full-bridge topology, so this solar inverter design uses four high-voltage IGBT (Figure 1). Transistors Q1 and Q2 as a high-pressure side IGBT, Q3 and Q4 as low-side power devices. In order to maintain a low total power dissipation low and high power conversion efficiency, the DC / DC inverter solutions utilize low-end and high-side IGBT generation frequency is 60Hz single-phase AC pure sine wave. The author of another article also describes how to apply for such a correct selection of solar inverter high voltage IGBT.