Design of Efficient Control Interaction with Power Converters for Photovoltaic Applications

Abstract

Solar energy is trending nowadays on showing its highness towards the environment. PV (Photo Voltaic) systems can be utilized for low, medium, and high-power applications according to the scale of generation. However, PV systems face challenges in providing efficient generation due to the wide nonlinear behavior of the system and nonlinear switching functions with power converters. Thus, the design of effective control systems is essential to interact with the power electronic world in the PV generation while retaining power quality. In this list, the MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) control technique tops the list of control strategies in the PV world for extracting the maximum available power from the panel. In this thesis, the fuzzy PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) MPPT control technique is designed to achieve the desired results against the nonlinearities addressed in the PV system and is achieved through the direct control of the duty cycle of power converters. Direct control mode required high technical skills to design the controllers for achieving the target with better control performances, even when showing accuracy with MPP (Maximum Power Operating Point) decisions. newlineMost of the conventional MPPT control techniques get modified by taking the adaptiveness from other controllers to achieve the desired target with better control performances. The same adaptiveness can also be provided using closed-loop control mode for better control performances. Here, closed loop control is applied for MPPT control and grid control of a single-phase PV-grid integrated system using the nonlinear PI (Proportional-Integral) controller to overcome the disadvantages addressed in the direct control mode. Nonlinear gain is added to the PI controller and takes nonlinear action against the error. It reduces the difficulty of tuning PI gains and provides better transient and steady-state performances in closed-loop control.