Optimization and control of photovoltaic water pumping system using kalman filter based MPPT and multilevel inverter fed DTC-IM

This paper aims to research a photovoltaic solar water pumping system (PVWPS) based on a three-phase induction motor (IM) with high performance, low cost, and without chemical energy storage. The proposed control for the PVWPS consists of two principal controllers. The first controller is used to control the system to reach its maximum using a robust MPPT control strategy that is based on the Kalman filter algorithm (KF-MPPT). While the second controller is based on 12-sectors Direct Torque Control (DTC). This technique is proposed to control the IM with the centrifugal pump through a three-level inverter with a neutral point clamped (NPC) structure. Furthermore, to increase the performance of the proposed control without affecting the system efficiency, the torque and flux hysteresis regulators level is increased to five and three levels, respectively. To see the behaviors of the PVWPS with the proposed control, the whole system was designed and simulated in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. This work also includes a comparative analysis to show the performance of the proposed control compared to the conventional controls. This analysis is done first to compare the performance of the KF-MPPT, VSS-P&O-MPPT, and VSS-INC-MPPT using variable radiation, and then to compare the proposed KF-MPPT-PDTC and the conventional KF-MPPT-DTC under a daily climatic profile. The simulated results showed that PVWPS with KF-MPPT and PDTC provide a better performance in terms of reference tracking, response time, torque and flux ripple reduction, current quality, as well as water pumped. •Three MPP T controls: VSS-P&O, VSS-INC, and KF combined with DTC were used to control the Photovoltaic water pumping system.•The proposed DTC to control the adopted Photovoltaic water pumping system is made. This technique is proposed to overcome the limitations of the conventional DTC.•The proposed DTC showed significantly reduces torque and flux ripple, and total harmonics distortion of stator currents, increasing the water pumped.