Search

In recent times, photovoltaic (PV) power generation has been growing due to increase in energy demand. In grid-connected mode, achieving maximum power (MP) from the PV array is difficult by using conventional techniques due to various reasons like low tracking efficiency, stability issues, etc. This motivates the design of an appropriate control strategy to obtain the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) to harvest MP from the PV array. This paper proposes a combined higher order sliding mode observer (HOSMO)–super-twisting control (STC) for a grid-connected scenario. A perturb and observe (P &O) technique is employed to generate reference voltage, and a HOSMO is proposed to drive the STC by estimating the inductor current of the PV boost converter. The proposed controller performance is evaluated based on response time across various scenarios, including generation changes, dynamic faults, islanding and resynchronization, and load variations in comparison to other existing controllers. These microgrid test cases have been thoroughly simulated, and their effectiveness has been validated in real-time using OPAL-RT (OP4510). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread integration of renewable energy sources (RESs) into power systems using power electronics-based interface devices has led to a substantial rise in power quality (PQ) issues. There is an immediate requirement for effective monitoring, detection, and classification of power quality disturbances (PQDs) that is needed to take remedial measures and design planning of the system architecture. This study presents a hybrid approach with an objective for the feature extraction and classification of PQDs. The proposed hybrid approach is comprised of an optimized tunable-Q wavelet transform (OTQWT) for the feature extraction and incremental support vector machine (ISVM). A four-stage approach is suggested for the PQ detection and classification in this study. In the first stage, the various data are retrieved both in the form of synthetic data by mathematical formulations and real-time data with prototype design setup. In the second stage, regardless of the specified wavelet function, the PQD signals are decomposed into low-pass and high-pass sub-bands using the tunable-Q wavelet transform (TQWT). However, the utilization of default decomposition parameters to address nonstationary PQ signals may lead to information loss and reduced performance of the system. To avoid this limitation, an OTQWT as an enhanced technique to TQWT based on an Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) is suggested. A modified objective function based on the mean square error (MSE) is used to improve the decomposition process. In the third stage, an efficient classifier is suggested based on the ISVM. Lastly, to test and evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, twelve types of PQDs including noise and multiple occurrences are considered. The comparative analysis with other popular methods reflects the better performance of the proposed approach and justifies its use for PQ detection and classification purposes in real-time​ conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]