Simplified Active Power Regulation Scheme for Grid Connected Solar Photovoltaic based Micro-Inverter

ABSTRACT

A simplified active power regulation (APR) scheme for a single-stage grid-connected micro-inverter with pulsating power decoupling capability has been proposed and tested in this work. The versatility of the active power regulation control method makes it to contribute an analytical solution based on maximum power point (MPP) estimation and operate at the right-hand side (RHS) of the PV characteristics while giving reserve fraction. The injection of power to the grid with the help of an APR scheme can be witnessed using the reserve fraction. A test setup with 250 Wp solar panel feeding power to a 230 V, 50 Hz single-phase grid through a single-stage grid-connected micro-inverter has been utilized to test the proposed APR scheme. The entire system has been modeled in MATLAB/ SIMULINK and the same has been implemented and verified by hardware experimentation whose results have been reported with different environmental conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Active power regulation
• micro-inverter
• grid-connected solar-photovoltaic system
• reserve control
• maximum power point estimation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Nomenclature

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ganesh Moorthy Jagadeesan

Ganesh Moorthy Jagadeesan received his B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Saranathan college of Engineering, Trichy and M. E degree in Solar Energy from College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, and He is currently working towards his Ph.D at the solar photovoltaic converter topologies and grid connected PV systems.

Raja Pitchaimuthu

Raja Pitchaimuthu, obtained his M.Tech degree in Energy Systems from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai in 2002 and PhD degree from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli in 2013. He is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli at India where he has been since 2006. His field of interest is design and development of controllers for power converters used in solar and wind energy conversion systems. He also does research in the development of protection schemes for transmission and distribution systems. He is a Senior Member in IEEE, life member of ISTE and Institution of Engineers (India).

Moorthi Sridharan

Moorthi Sridharan is a faculty in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India, since 2007 and is associated with the VLSI Systems Research Laboratory in the same department. He completed his Ph.D in the area of VLSI for Communication circuits during 2008 at Anna University, Chennai. Further, he is a Post-Doctoral fellow of Erasmus Mundus External Co-operation Window initiated under EURINDIA Programme in which he has done Post-Doctoral research on Memory design for Reconfigurable Architectures at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. His research interests include VLSI for signal processing and embedded systems.

Venkata Kirthiga Murali

Venkata Kirthiga Murali completed her B.E. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and M.Tech. in Power Systems in 2000 and 2004 respectively. She is currently working as an Associate Professor at the EEE department of the National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli India and has a total of eighteen of teaching experience. She is with NITT since 2006 and has published 45 - international journal and conference publications of IEEE and Springer. She is a reviewer for many reputed journals. She has guided many UG and PG projects. She has also guided 3 Ph.Ds and 1 M.S. (by research). She is senior IEEE member and Fellow of Institution of Engineers India. Her areas of interest are Power Systems, Distributed Generation and Micro-grids and High Voltage DC Transmission