Standalone solar water pumping system utilizing parallel connected quadratic boost converter: controller design and hardware in loop implementation

ABSTRACT

The selection of passive components and the optimized design of control system are the challenging task for designing standalone solar water pumping system (SWPS). This article presents the complete procedure for optimum design and rapid hardware in loop implementation of SWPS. The presented SWPS consists of SPV source, high gain quadratic boost converter (QBC), voltage source inverter, and induction motor coupled to pump. Two design aspects, i.e., passive components design and control system design, are discussed in detail. In passive components, QBC inductor are designed to have continuous conduction operation even at lower sun radiation. In control system design, the procedure to get optimized control system parameter is presented, where first system transfer function is estimated using data-driven system identification procedure and then the optimum DC-bus voltage controller gains are derived by frequency response analysis. To verify system performances, the hardware in loop implementation of designed system is explained, where the control algorithm is implemented in generic ARM Cortex-M4 Microcontroller STM32F407VG with real time simulator OPAL-RT. The extensive experiments are conducted by considering variable sun radiation on SPV source. The test results verify the effective DC-bus voltage regulation and the adaptive speed control performance of SWPS under the variable sun radiation.

KEYWORDS:

• Hardware in loop implementation
• optimize controller design
• quadratic boost converter
• solar energy conversion
• solar water pumping system

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rajan V. Vamja

Rajan V. Vamja received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai College of Engineering, Ahmedabad, India in 2013, the M.Tech. degree from the Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, India in 2016. Currently, he is looking forward to his Ph.D. degree from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, India. His research interests include renewable energy system, electrical drives, power quality.

Mahmadasraf A. Mulla

Mahmadasraf Abdulhamid Mulla received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from the Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, India, in 1995, the M.E. degree from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, India, in 1997, and Ph.D. degree from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology in 2015. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology. His research interests include solar and wind energy conversion, electrical drives, power quality, and active power filters.