Switching loss analysis of IGBT and MOSFET in single phase PWM inverter fed from photovoltaic energy sources for smart cities

In this modern world, the need of renewable energy power generation has grown lot, due to the huge increase in power demand as well depletion of fossil fuels. In smart cities, solar applications such as solar power generation in the city and offsite, solar water heaters for hot water, solar PV rooftop systems for electricity, solar street lightings, solar pumps for water lifting, solar concentrators for steam based cooking, solar traffic signals, and solar road studs/blinkers are widely used. Buildings consume around 40% of the energy used in a city. Energy efficient green buildings that are linked with renewable energy and energy conservation technologies can save 30–40% of the conventional energy used in buildings. solar photovoltaic (PV) with voltage source inverters are being widely used these days in the power sector.These inverters have power losses which occur mainly in semi-conductor elements. This paper portrays a study on losses in these inverters. It also aims at increasing the efficiency of the inverter by reducing switching losses. Semi-conductor switching element's power losses vary with switches. Here we are comparing the most widely used semiconductor switches like Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) and Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MOSFET). A single-phase inverter based on IGBT and MOSFET is designed and simulated in a MATLAB-Simulink environment. The voltage drop and thereby the power loss across the switches are compared by simulation. The inverter switching is carried out by Pulse Width Modulation(PWM) technique, which many advantages than other techniques. The proposed technique shows that the inverter with IGBT has low power loss than the inverter with MOSFET.