MMLSTOGI based control for suppression of current harmonics in PV-tied grid

In a photovoltaic array (PVA) tied grid system, PVA and the grid are connected at AC bus (ACB) to feed the power to the grid and the load connected locally at the ACB. The photovoltaic energy conversion system (PVECS) requires an improved dynamic controller to control the grid voltage harmonics under variable solar power and nonlinear unbalanced load conditions. The conventional filtering controllers are unable to remove the sub-harmonics and DC-offset in the input signal. Moreover, their attenuation for the dominant lower order harmonics is unsatisfactory for unbalanced loading conditions and highly nonlinear loads. A MMLSTOGI (mixed multi-level second and third order generalized integrator) based control is used in this work. It effectively mitigates the dominant lower-order harmonics and the DC-offset of load currents and extracts their in-phase and quadrature-phase fundamental components (FCs). The PVA is connected at ACB through interfacing voltage source converter (VSC). The DC-link voltage is ascertained by generating its reference value using an incremental conductance (InC) based maximum power point tracking. The PVA power is feed-forwarded in the control to enhance the dynamics of the system. The control is validated on a developed model in MATLAB SIMULINK background, and using a developed prototype.