An Advanced Universal Power Quality Conditioning System and MPPT method for grid integration of photovoltaic systems

A photovoltaic system usually produces power quality pollutions to the interfaced power systems without a proper functioning of active filters. At present, available active filters are unable to fully suppress power grid harmonics and distortions, worsening power quality conditions within the interfaced system. This paper presents an Advanced Universal Power Quality Conditioning System (AUPQS) to interface photovoltaic systems to a power grid. In the interfaced system, an improved series active filter is designed to generate output voltages to compensate all the source voltage deficiencies and to highly suppress the grid-end current harmonics and distortions, even under unbalanced non-linear load conditions. Also, an independent single-phase inverter is suggested at the load side instead of the source side to regulate the DC-link voltage. Hence, the distortions and harmonics generated by this single-phase inverter are absorbed by the shunt filter of the AUPQS. Finally, a hybrid maximum power point tracking (MPPT) approach is proposed for effective operation of photovoltaic systems even under sudden light intensity changes and solar cells temperature variations. The overall interfaced system is designed and developed using Matlab/Simulink software. The effectiveness of the proposed AUPQS and MPPT method is further validated by simulation results.