Design And Control of Power Converters for Renewable Energy Systems

Abstract

Renewable energy sources normally require power converters to convert their energy into standardized regulated ac output. The motivation for this thesis is to design and control power converters for renewable energy systems to ensure very good power quality, efficiency and reliability. The renewable energy sources considered are low voltage dc sources such as photovoltaic (PV) modules. Two transformer-isolated power circuit topologies with input voltage of less than 50V are designed and developed for low and medium power applications. Various design and control issues of these converters are identified and new solutions are proposed. For low power rating of a few hundred watts, a line-frequency transformer interfaced inverter is developed. In the grid connected operation, it is observed that this topology injects considerable lower order odd and even harmonics in the grid current. The reasons for this are identified. A new current control method using adaptive harmonic compensation technique and a proportional-resonant-integral (PRI) controller is proposed. The proposed current controller is designed to ensure that the grid current harmonics are within the limits set by the IEEE 1547-2003 standard. Phase-locked loops (PLLs) are used for grid synchronization of power converters in grid-tied operation and for closed-loop control reference generation. Analysis and design of synchronous reference frame PLL (SRF-PLL) and second-order generalized integrator (SOGI) based PLLs considering unit vector distortion under the possible non-ideal grid conditions of harmonics, unbalance, dc offsets and frequency deviations are proposed and validated. Both SRF-PLL and SOGI-PLL are low-complexity PLLs. The proposed designs achieve fastest settling time for these PLLs for a given worst-case input condition. The harmonic distortion and dc offsets in the resulting unit vectors are limited to be well within the limits set by the IEEE 1547-2003 standard. The proposed designs can be used to achieve very good performance using conventional low-complexity PLLs without the requirement of advanced PLLs which can be computationally intensive. A high-frequency (HF) transformer interfaced ac link inverter with a lossless snubber is developed medium power level in the order of few kilowatts. The HF transformer makes the topology compact and economical compared to an equally rated line frequency transformer. A new synchronized modulation method is proposed to suppress the possible over-voltages due to current commutation in the leakage inductance of the HF transformer. The effect of circuit non-ideality of turn-on delay time is analyzed. The proposed modulation mitigates the problem of spurious turn-on that can occur due to the turn-on delay time. The HF inverter, rectifier and snubber devices have soft switching with this modulation. A new reliable start-up method is proposed for this inverter topology without any additional start- up circuitry. This solves the problems of over-voltages and inrush currents during start-up. The overall research work reported in the thesis shows that it is possible to have compact, reliable and high performance power converters for renewable energy conversion systems. It is also shown that high control performance and power quality can be achieved using the proposed control techniques of low implementation complexity.