This paper deals with controlling a grid-connected dual-active bridge multilevel inverter for renewable energy integration. The concept of direct power control is integrated with model predictive control algorithm, which is termed as predictive direct power control, to control the real and reactive power injected into the power grid. The proposed multilevel inverter allows more options of feasible voltage vectors for switching vector selections in order to generate multilevel outputs, and thereby obtaining high power quality in the power grid. By using the predictive direct power control, simulation results show that the proposed multilevel inverter produces lower power ripple and manage to achieve currents with low total harmonic distortion which are well within the IEEE standard. The modeling and simulation of the system are implemented and validated by MATLAB Simulink software.

Multilevel inverters are one of the preferred inverter choices for solar photovoltaic (PV) applications. While these inverters are capable of producing AC staircase output voltage waveform, the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage waveform can become worse if the switching angle of each voltage level is not carefully chosen. In this paper, four switching angle arrangement techniques are presented and the switching angles generated by these techniques are applied to a new single-phase boost multilevel (SPBM) inverter. The performance of 3-, 5-, 7-, 9-and 11-level SPBM inverter having four different sets of switching angles derived using the aforementioned techniques have been evaluated and compared using PSIM software. Simulation results show that one of the techniques is able to produce an output voltage waveform with the lowest THD, whilst the other generates an output voltage waveform with the highest fundamental voltage component.