Investigation on power quality issues and implementation of metaheuristic algorithms for enhanced performance of pv sofc microgrid systems

Abstract

Accelerated adoption of renewable energy technologies (RETs) newlineis anticipated to play a pivotal role in mitigating the detrimental impacts of newlineconventional power generation, primarily as an alternative to fossil fuel based newlineenergy generation technologies. Among various RETs available, photovoltaic newline(PV) and wind energy technologies contribute to a substantial percentage of newlinethe global renewable energy installed capacity. In particular, PV power is the newlinemost compatible to Asian climates owing to its immense potential, abundant newlineavailability, and commercial analogousness to conventional energy. Apart newlinefrom the advantages that it possesses, the dependency to environmental newlinefactors limits the flexibility of PV based RET concepts. As it is, the renewable newlineenergy industry is rapidly progressing towards hybrid power generation by newlineenabling microgrids (MGs) for distributed power generation, combining two or newlinemore RET technologies providing better stability, safety and flexible power newlineproduction. However, increased penetration of renewables and power newlineelectronics concurrently affects the power quality of the utility grid. To address newlinesuch unlikely scenarios, this work presents an adaptive as well as intelligent newlinepower control technique for power quality enhancement in microgrids while newlinebeing connected to an infinite bus. For demonstration, a DC/AC microgrid newlinecomprising of a PV system and a fuel cell stack (SOFC-Solid Oxide Fuel Cell) newlinecontrolled using Proportional Integral (PI) technique is considered in this newlinethesis to reduce multiple power conversion stages.Extensive simulations and assessments performed in this thesis newlinedemonstrate the superior performance of the proposed techniques compared newlinewith the well-established values in literature. To be precise, the voltage THD newlinevalues attained for MGA and IPSO methods are 1.19%, and 1% respectively, newlinewhile the current THDs obtained are 1.4%, and 1.27%.