A Novel MIMO SMC for Comprehensive Unified Control of the Cascaded DC-DC
and DC-AC Converters in Grid Connected Photovoltaic Systems
Abstract
It is well-known that DC-DC boost converters are cascaded with DC-AC
inverters for grid connection of the photovoltaic (PV) systems. In the
traditional control approaches, the mentioned DC-DC and DC-AC converters
are controlled separately to facilitate the controller design problem.
However, from the controller design viewpoint, the overall structure of
the grid connected PV generator is a multi-input multi-output (MIMO)
system. The duty-cycle of the DC-DC converter and Inverter modulation
index are the control inputs and on the other hand, generated
photovoltaic DC power, and exported power to the grid are control
outputs. Moreover, the inverter DC link voltage should be stabilized by
the closed-loop controller as well as an internal control output. If
controllers are designed separately, it means that the interaction
between DC-DC and DC-AC controllers isn’t considered accurately and
since the isolated models of DC-DC converter and DC-AC inverter are
extracted based on some approximated assumptions, separate controller
design cannot guarantee stability and robustness of the whole system in
a wide range of operation. To cope with these problems, in this paper, a
novel MIMO sliding mode controller (SMC) is developed for comprehensive
closed-loop control of the DC-DC boost converter cascaded with a
single-phase DC-AC grid connected photovoltaic inverter. In the proposed
approach, the dynamic model of whole system is developed comprehensively
at first and then a unique MIMO controller is designed to control both
DC-to-AC and DC-to-DC converters together. To cope with the nonlinear
characteristic of the system and uncertainty of model parameters in a
wide range, a fixed-frequency SMC is developed using the comprehensive
state space model of the closed loop system. In the proposed MIMO-SMC
controller, the AC power (which is exported to the grid) and operating
point of the PV source are controlled via inverter modulation index and
duty cycle of the DC-DC boost converter respectively. Another major
advantage of the proposed system is mitigating the non-minimum phase
characteristic of the boost converter through the indirect control of
inverter DC link capacitor. To evaluate the performance of the designed
control system, simulation results are compared with a standard linear
PI controller. It is shown that the developed system has zero
steady-state error and enjoys faster dynamic response during the
start-up and step changes of AC and DC current references. Moreover, it
can maintain the stability of closed-loop systems in a wide range of
operations.