Harmonic Profile Enhancement of Grid Connected Fuel Cell through Cascaded H-Bridge Multi-Level Inverter and Improved Squirrel Search Optimization Technique

The generation of energy by conventional systems leads to several environmental issues. Fuel Cell (FC), being a new renewable energy source, has emerged as one of the promising alternatives to obtain clean and efficient energy generation. This paper highlights the power quality enhancement of the grid connected FC through a boost converter and 25 level Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) Multi-Level Inverter (MLI) using the classical PID controller. To drive the MLI connected to the grid for governing the Point of Common Coupling (PCC) voltage between the FC and the grid, two PID controllers have been utilized. The conventional evolutionary techniques such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Squirrel Search Algorithm (SSA) are implemented to tune the PID controllers for dynamic operations. To further enhance the convergence speed of computation and precision of the classical techniques used, an Improved Squirrel Search Algorithm (ISSA) has been proposed in this work. The grid connected power network considered for study here is designed using MATLAB/Simulink environment. Moreover, the system is led to various rigorous voltage sag and swell conditions to test the effectiveness of the proposed controller. A detailed comparison between the conventional PID, PSO, SSA, and proposed ISSA techniques in voltage profile improvement, power quality enhancement, and reduced execution time has been featured. The results obtained highlight the proposed technique’s superiority over the classical methods in terms of improved dynamic voltage response, enhanced power quality, and reduced harmonics. The power quality indices are found out using Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) analysis. The values found out are well within the IEEE-547 indices for the proposed controller, thus justifying its real-time implementation.