Today, small distributed power generation (DG) systems are becoming more common as the need for electric power increases. Small DG systems are usually built close to the end-user and they take advantage of using different energy sources such as wind and solar. A few examples are hybrid cars, solar houses, data centers, or hospitals in remote areas where providing clean, efficient and reliable electric power is critical to the loads. In such systems, the power is distributed from the source side to the load side via power electronic converters in the system. At low and medium power applications, the task is often left to single phase inverters where they are the only interface between sources connected to DC bus and loads connected to an AC bus. Much has been done for the control of single phase inverters in the past years; however, due to the requirements of stand alone systems and the time-varying nature of the converter, its controller design is still quite difficult, and especially so if its critical functionality within the system is taken into consideration. Part of the challenge is also due to the fact that the load is not known at all time, further complicating the controller design.

This thesis proposes a different method of control for single phase inverters used in low and medium power DG systems. The new control method takes advantage of the well-known DQ transformation and analysis mostly employed for three phase converters' analysis and control design. Providing a time-invariant model of single phase inverters is the main feature of DQ transformation. In addition to that, control design of the inverter in DQ frame becomes similar to those of DC-DC and three phase converters making it easier to achieve superior performance under different operation conditions while achieving a robust controller.

The transformation requires at least two independent phases for each state variable in the system; thus a second phase must be created. This thesis proposes the creation of an imaginary circuit based on the real circuit of the inverter to provide the second required phase for transformation. The state variables of the imaginary circuit are obtained by differentiating the state variables of the main inviter's circuit. The differentiation can be implemented in DSP so there is no need for additional hardware in the system, making it more attractive and cost effective method.

The DQ controller not only provides superior transient response, it also provides zero steady-state error as well as low output voltage THD under nonlinear load operation. The entire controller can be implemented in a digital control board which is becoming more common in power electronics converters within the past decade. Analysis and design of a DQ controller for a 2.5kW single phase full-bridge inverter is presented in this study with the final results implemented in a FPGA/DSP based digital controller board.