A Robust Fuzzy-based Control Technique for Grid-
Connected Operation of Sensor-Less PUC5 Inverter
Mohammad Babaie1, Mohammad Sharifzadeh2, Majid Mehrasa1, Louis-Félix Baillargeon2, Kamal Al-Haddad2
1
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University, Iran
2
GREPCI, Ecole de Technologie Superieure, University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada
mohammad.sharifzadeh@ieee.org, kamal.al-haddad@etsmtl.ca
Abstract—This paper presents a robust fuzzy-based control
strategy for single-phase five-level PUC5 inverter in grid-
connected mode that can properly improve the grid power
quality. The proposed control technique is able to provide unity
power factor between grid voltage and current by accurately
injecting the needed load currents in presence of unmolded
uncertainties. To provide robust property, the proposed fuzzy-
based control strategy for accurate operation of PUC5 in grid-
connected conditions has been designed. Simulation results in
MATLAB software verify the proposed control technique
abilities at achieving very low THD grid current, unity power
factor, appropriate output voltage and SPWM reference signal.
Index Terms— robust fuzzy-based control technique, PUC5,
unity power factor, grid power quality, grid current, output
voltage.
I. INTRODUCTION
Multilevel converters have been recently utilized for both
stand-alone and grid-connected modes in different applications
to reach a more effective performance under various operating
conditions because of their features such as less voltage stress
upon switches with more power/voltage and significant less
harmonic generation [1-7]. The three conventional multilevel
inverter including Diode Clamped, Flying Capacitors and
Cascaded H-Bridge topologies have disadvantages of number
of components and DC sources as well as capacitor voltage
balancing particularly when they are extended to produce more
voltage the mentioned disadvantages are emerged as critical
challenged [8-14]. Although some problems such as capacitor
voltage balancing can be solved through properly designing the
control strategies or modulation techniques, number of
components remains as physical disadvantage that confine the
efficiency of conventional multilevel inverters in related
applications [15-20].
Therefore, due to the importance of multilevel converters and
to overcome the drawbacks of conventional multilevel
inverters, introducing multilevel converters with novel
structure has been more attracted in recent years [21-23].
Among recent presented multilevel topologies, five-level
Packed U-Cell known as PUC5 has been employed as
promising single-phase single-DC source inverter that has
minimum number of components among other similar
topologies[23, 24]. The DC capacitor in PUC5 is sensor-less
l-))) 

balanced since it is charged in half cycle and discharged in the
other one. Considering the fact that DC capacitor is self-
regulated, the corresponding PUC5 control strategy for stand-
alone or grid-connected operations is simplified and will be
easily designed. Various control strategy and modulation
technique has been applied on PUC5 in which the capacitor
voltage is sensor-less balanced [24].
In this paper, a fuzzy-based control method is proposed to
achieve unity power factor between PUC5 inverter current and
grid voltage, and regulate the performance of single-phase
PUC5 inverter in grid connected operation condition while the
DC capacitor is sensor-less regulated. The main part of
designing the proposed control technique is setting the fuzzy
membership functions for significantly improving the
operation of PUC5. In this case, the membership functions
have been tuned by trial and error method. Based on the error
value, the fuzzy-based control method generates proper
reference signal for the switching function of SPWM module.
The paper is organized as mentioned in the following. In
section II, the PUC5 inverter is completely described and then
the proposed fuzzy-based control technique for grid-connected
operation condition of PUC5 is explained with details. The
simulation results are discussed in section III. Finally,
conclusions are provided in section IV.
II. PROPOSED FUZZY-BASED CONTROL TECHNIQUE FOR GRID-
CONNECTED OPERATION OF PUC5 INVERTER
A. PUC5 Inverter Topology and Related Switching States
The detailed structure of single-phase PUC5 inverter is
depicted in Fig.1. PUC5 is consisted of, a DC-link voltage that
comes from a DC capacitor and single-DC source as well as six
IGBT-based switches that can operate according to Table I.
Table I shows the corresponding switching states of PUC5
inverter by which inverter can generates five-level voltage
waveform while the DC capacitor is self-balanced. According
to Table I, the DC capacitor has charging and discharged states
for both voltage level ±E. as a result, if it is assumed to be in
charging state in half positive cycle for +E and discharged for
negative half cycle, it can be balanced naturally and no extra
sensor is required.



figures, the fuzzifier and defuzzifie blocks will be set as the

iout
S1 S1' fuzzy controller input and output, respectively.
As it can be seen from Fig. 3, the error values in the fuzzy
V1=Vdc input will be divided into five parts, 1) negative big (NB), 2)
+ normal negative (NN), 3) zero (Z), 4) normal positive (NP)
R

AC Load
and 5) positive big (PB). For the fuzzy input, the acceptable
S2 S2'

Vout
maximum tracking error for the converter current is
considered within the interval [-4, 4]. On the other hand, the
V2=1/2Vdc L fuzzy-based control technique output is assorted into three
C1 - parts of 1) negative (N), 2) zero (Z), and 3) positive (P).
S3 S3' Maximum value of output signal is limited in interval [-2.5,
2.5]. The membership functions used in the fuzzy-based
control technique output and input are shaped based on
triangular and trapezoidal approximations. Relying on these
Fig. 1. Configuration of single-phase single-DC source PUC5 inverter
membership functions, the required rules are defined
TABLE I according to Table II.
8 POSSIBLE SWITCHING STATES FOR SENSOR-LESS PUC5 INVERTER
Switching Effect on NB NN Z NP PB
S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 Vout
State Capacitor 1
1 1 0 0 0 1 1 +2E 0
2 1 0 1 0 1 0 +E +
3 1 1 0 0 0 1 +E - 0.8
4 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0

Degree of membership
5 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
0.6
6 0 0 1 1 1 0 -E -
7 0 1 1 1 0 0 -E +
8 0 1 1 1 0 0 -2E 0
0.4

B. Proposed Fuzzy-Based Control Strategy for Grid- 0.2

Connected Operation
To completely understand the basic operations used for 0
controlling PUC5, the general description of fuzzy-based
-4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4
control strategy is given in Fig. 2. According to this figure, the e Ia (A)
fuzzy controller configuration is designed based on single-
Fig. 3. The membership function used as the input of fuzzy-based control
input single-output Mamdani type. In the control loop of strategy
single-phase five-level PUC, the error between input current
and its reference value generated by PLL is employed as 1
N Z P

depicted in Fig. 2. By using a nonlinear mapping of error

signal that is identified as the input of fuzzy-based control
0.8
technique, a desired reference signal is obtained in output that
Degree of membership

is employed for SPWM. To reach the achieved reference

signal, no parameters need to be set. A fuzzy controller 0.6

contains four sections included, 1) fuzzifier, 2) rules base, 3)

inference engine and 4) defuzzifie. The section of inference 0.4

engine is constructed by reasoning and aggregation sections

that act for the rules reasoning and aggregating the results of 0.2

the reasoning of all the rules, respectively.

a iL
Rules Base S1 S1' 0
V1=Vdc A1
Input Inference Engine
Output
fuzzifier L
Defuzzifier -2.5 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5
O
eIa SPWM S2 S2'
+
- Reasoning Aggrigation A Vsin (V)
Vsin Technique D
V2=1/2Vdc
Fuzzy Controller
IaSinȦ(t) S3
C1
S3'
Fig. 4. The membership function used as the output of fuzzy-based control
Grid
IrefSinȦ(t) Ȧ(t)
strategy
Sin() Iref PLL
PUC Inverter b
The rules of Table II are processed through minimum
Fig. 2. The general description of fuzzy-based control strategy
Mamdani reasoning to be used for each input error signal and
To attain the aims of proposed fuzzy-based control consequently the final fuzzy value for the entire rules are
technique, the fuzzifier and defuzzifie membership functions generated in the fuzzy output by the help of maximum
are considered as Fig.3 and 4, respectively. According to these aggregation. The nonlinear mapping which describes the





operation of the used fuzzy inference engine can be seen in III. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Fig. 5. In order to show the performance of proposed fuzzy-based
Table II
The Fuzzy Rules Estimator. control method on sensor-less PUC5 inverter operates in grid-
If Then
connected mode, some simulation results are obtained and
presented in this section. The fuzzy-based control generates
NB N
proper reference signal in such way that unity power factors
NN N
occur between single-phase PUC5 inverter current and grid
PB P
voltage waveforms. The used parameters in simulation tests of
NP P
PUC5 inverter are listed in Table III.
Z Z Table III
0.6 THE VALUE OF EMPLOYED PARAMETERS IN SIMULATION TEST OF PUC5
Grid voltage (Vs) 110 Vrms
0.4 Fundamental frequency 60 Hz
Switching frequency (SPWM) 2000 Hz
0.2
Grid side inductor (Ls) 5 mH
DC voltage (Vdc) 200 V
0
Vsin (V)

DC capacitor 2500 μF

-0.2

The required fuzzy membership functions and nonlinear

-0.4 mapping are the same shown in Figs.3 to Fig. 5. The produced
reference sinusoidal waveform of proposed fuzzy-based control
-0.6 required for SPWM technique and generating the
corresponding pulses for PUC5 inverter is illustrated in Fig. 6.
-0.8
-4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4
eIa (A)

Fig. 5. The nonlinear mapping created by database

Then, the following Center average defuzzifier function is

9 6LQ9

employed to convert the fuzzy output to the needed real value

as:

¦P μ j =1
j j (x i )
y = R (1) Fig. 6. Generated reference signal for SPWM technique in fuzzy-based cotrol

¦μ
j =1
j (x i )
where, i and j are the number of input variable and fuzzy
rule, respectively. R shows that how many fuzzy rules are. μ j is
the accuracy amount of jth fuzzy rule with variation magnitude
of [0 1]. P is the center of membership function of jth fuzzy
rule. Thus, considering the fuzzy controller specifications that
are designed in this paper, relationship Eq. (1) can be rewritten
as Eq. (2):
5
Fig.7 shows the output five-level and DC capacitor voltage
waveforms along with injected inverter current and grid
voltage when the single-phase PUC5 runs under steady state
situations. According to Fig. 7, a suitable five-level voltage can
be achieved for PUC5 by accurate performance of proposed
controller. It is due to the fact that the DC capacitor voltage can
inherently track its desired value that is half of input DC
source; but, it has negligible fluctuation. Also, by properly
controlling through applying fuzzy-based control technique, the
inverter current and grid voltage are in same phase which
means only active power is transferred to grid side because the

¦P μ
load current accurately follows its error signal of reference.
j j (e I a ) In order to scrutinize the performance of fuzzy-based control,
j =1
V sin = 5 (2)
it has been tested when the reference current varies. Fig. 8
demonstrates five-level and capacitor voltages as well as
¦μ
j =1
j (e I a ) inverter current and grid voltage while the single-phase PUC5
output current increases from 5 to 7 and decreases to 4. As can
be seen from Fig. 8, the PUC5 output current and grid voltage
where, ela is the error signal of reference current tracking. are perfectly in phase and there is no transient when the
As the only input, this signal is applied to the fuzzy controller. reference current changes. Moreover, the five-level voltage has
Also Vsin is the reference signal of SPWM switching method been clearly produced since the DC capacitor voltage is self-
that is extracted from the proposed fuzzy-based control balanced to the determined level. Although the capacitor
technique output. voltage ripple has been increased due to increasing the output




current, it has remained it acceptable range that is below 5%. IV. CONCLUSIONS
Therefore, the proposed fuzzy-based control is reliable to be To reach a desired output voltage as well as a proper load
considered as suitable control strategy in the grid connected current injection for single-phase five-level PUC5 converter, a
operation condition of inverters. fuzzy-based control technique has been designed in this paper.

The main duty of the proposed control strategy has been
generating the proper switching reference signal by Mamdani-
9 F 9



based logical fuzzy controller to behave robust against model


      
uncertainty. Simulation results have been accomplished in
MATLAB software that have verified the proposed control
 technique capability at reaching desired output voltage,

injecting accurate current for load and achieving unity power
9 RXW 9


 factor and very low THD grid current.

      
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