No abstract

Dual-stage standalone photovoltaic (PV) systems suffer from stability, reliability issues, and their efficiency to deliver maximum power is greatly affected by changing environmental conditions. A hybrid back-stepping control (BSC) is a good candidate for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) however, there are eminent steady-state oscillations in the PV output due to BSC’s recursive nature. The issue can be addressed by proposing a hybrid integral back-stepping control (IBSC) algorithm where the proposed integral action significantly reduces the steady-state oscillations in the PV array output under varying temperature and solar irradiance level. Simultaneously, at the AC stage, the primary challenge is to reduce both the steady-state tracking error and total harmonic distortion (THD) at the output of VSI, resulting from the load parameter variations. Although the conventional sliding mode control (SMC) is robust to parameter variations, however, it is discontinuous in nature and inherit over-conservative gain design. In order to address this issue, a dynamic disturbance rejection strategy based on super twisting control (STC) has been proposed where a higher order sliding mode observer is designed to estimate the effect of load disturbances as a lumped parameter which is then rejected by the newly designed control law to achieve the desired VSI tracking performance. The proposed control strategy has been validated via MATLAB Simulink where the system reaches the steady-state in 0.005 s and gives a DC–DC conversion efficiency of 99.85% at the peak solar irradiation level. The AC stage steady-state error is minimized to 0 V whereas, THD is limited to 0.07% and 0.11% for linear and non-linear loads, respectively.

This paper proposes an improved model based predictive torque control (MPTC) method based on positional error between reference and estimated stator flux vectors. The main advantages of the proposed method are: the improved computational efficiency which requires minimum hardware resources and weighting-factor-free cost function. Weighting factor is removed by using modified reference transformation, which converts torque reference into equivalent stator flux reference. Improvement in computational performance is achieved by using decreased number of voltage vectors for prediction. An admissibility criterion based on flux positional errors is introduced to reduce the number of voltage vectors. The computational time saved is utilised to incorporate extended Kalman filter for better estimation of flux and torque. The validity of the proposed method is tested on a two-level three-phase inverter fed induction motor drive with dSpace DS1104 as controller board. The dynamic response and computational cost of the proposed method is compared to other established MPTC methods. The superiority of the proposed technique is confirmed by experimental results, which show an average of 32% reduction in computational time when compared to conventional MPTC while comparable dynamic response in terms of torque ripple, flux ripple and load current harmonics, is also maintained.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.