Photovoltaic Grid – connected Inverter Based MPPT Using PI Regulator

In this paper, an improved maximum power point (MPP) tracking (MPPT) with better performance based on voltage-oriented control (VOC) is proposed to solve a fastchanging irradiation problem. In VOC, a cascaded control structure with an outer dc link voltage control loop and an inner current control loop is used. The currents are controlled in a synchronous orthogonal d, q frame using a decoupled feedback control. The reference current of proportional– integral (PI) d-axis controller is extracted from the dc-side voltage regulator by applying the energy-balancing control. Furthermore, in order to achieve a unity power factor, the q-axis reference is set to zero. The MPPT controller is applied to the reference of the outer loop control dc voltage photovoltaic (PV). Without PV array power measurement, the proposed MPPT identifies the correct direction of the MPP by processing the d-axis current reflecting the power grid side and the signal error of the PI outer loop designed to only represent the change in power due to the changing atmospheric conditions. The robust tracking capability under rapidly increasing and decreasing irradiance is verified experimentally with a PV array emulator. Simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides effective, fast, and perfect tracking.