Microinverters

[__dan]

This came up in the day's reading. The result of a one million dollar cash Google Challenge for a next step 2 kW microinverter.

On the page link are entries technical descriptions. This is probably the single most concentrated listing of the current thinking in state of the art microinverters for PV conversion. I saved a few of the papers to the hard drive while they are available.

Srcoll down for the winner's and finalist's papers.

https://www.littleboxchallenge.com/

 

[jaggedben]

There was a thread when this was announced...

http://forums.mikeholt.com/showthread.php?t=172369

Don't call these microinverters.

Impressively, the winning team exceeded the power density goal for the competition by a factor of 3, which is 10 times more compact than commercially available inverters!

I am indeed impressed. I just wonder about cost and how long to be commercialized.

 

[__dan]

Missed the thread, did not know where to post it.

Micro as in small size.

From what I've been reading, most went to the GaN transistor for very high switching speeds, some over 100kHZ. But what I've been reading says the GaN is still a low yielding part. So IGBT's are probably the more competitive solution, except maybe in the tiny tiny package constraint. Not sure on first pass, but it seems the only advantage to the much higher switching speeds was the smaller inductors and caps, driven by the small size requirement.

I was surprised at the circuit topologies and there were certainly different circuit philosophies employed. Really stunning. The team papers had good discussion of their design philosophy and journey to the prototypes. I got the impression that if not for the contest, there was proprietary information that would never be released.