An original controller design for a grid connected PV system

PV energy generation has been one of the most active research areas in the past decades due to its inexhaustibility and environmental-friendly aspects. However, the great deal is to utilize the solar energy effectively through power electronics converters (conditioners) to meet the increasing demand for load. This paper proposes an experimental photovoltaic (PV) power conditioning system with line connection. The conditioner consists of a Flying Capacitors Inverter (FCI) feeding an inductive load and connected to the grid through transformer. A hybrid model of the power conditioning system is derived using the electrical equations and verified by a commuted Bond Graph (BG) method. The obtained hybrid model is an explicit standard model valid for all FCI configurations. An original controller based on weighted real-time predictive control technique is designed and its implementation is made simple using the derived hybrid model. The control algorithm transfers the power to the grid by controlling the current with unity power factor. The proposed controller transfers the power to the grid with lower harmonics content. The theoretical analysis, the simulation results and the experimental results are described in this paper.