Design and simulation of a unified power quality conditioner fed by solar energy

• A new unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) fed by solar energy is proposed.
• UPQC can export the active power to the grid.
• UPQC's topology is made up of a hybrid active power filter combination.
• UPQC can eliminate both the supply current distortion and the load voltage distortion.

Presently, quality problems in grid-integrated applications take great interest because of the growing applications in power electronics. The elimination of the harmonics in the grid and the usage of clean energy resources in the power electronics applications become popular world widely. In the present paper, a unified power quality conditioner fed by solar energy which can also export active power to the grid is proposed. The conditioner uses a photovoltaic (PV) system and its topology is made up of a hybrid active power filter combination. This combination bases on a parallel active power filter, which shares a common DC voltage assured by the photovoltaic system with a serial active power filter. According to the analyzes, the proposed unified power quality conditioner eliminates both the supply current distortion caused by a non-linear load and the load voltage distortion introduced after adding fifth and seventh harmonics to the AC main voltage. In addition, the proposed unified power quality conditioner exports the photovoltaic power to the grid using a boost converter, perturbed and observed maximum power point tracking algorithm, compensates the reactive power and filters the current and voltage harmonics confirmed by the total harmonic distortion values, such as 4.76% and 3.86%, respectively. The design and the analyses have been performed with MATLAB/Simulink software. The simulation system determines the performances of such system and offers future perspectives on unified power quality conditioners.