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Abstract
The increasing importance of renewable electricity, especially PV generation, and the reducing costs of PV modules has placed the inverter in limelight. Panel-level inverter configurations like Micro-inverter are gaining commercial importance, but hold a minor market share. On the other hand, PV inverters which are connected in series on the AC side, like cascaded multilevel inverter or cascaded H-bridge (CHB), are gaining research importance. Another such configuration called Inverter Molecule (IM), which is at its nascent stage seems to be very promising as a panel-level inverter configuration.The control structures employed for the distributed panel-level inverters in cascade such as CHB, are either centralized or hybrid. A control structure which is truly distributed, taking advantage of the inverter configuration/architecture, has not yet been developed. The hypothesis here is that, individual inverters of a string can be controlled independently of each other, without any communication because the common string current inherently shares the information with all members.Hence, a novel distributed control scheme has been designed and developed and its feasibility for the IM architecture is proved in this thesis, by mathematical modeling and analysis, and simulation results.