Photovoltaic systems optimization

SÁNCHEZ REINOSO, C. R.; DE PAULA, M.; MILONE, D. H.; BUITRAGO, R. H.

Congreso; 24th International Conference on Efficiency, Costs, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems; 2011

Multilevel inverters are widely used in solar energy generation systems consist of variousphotovoltaic generators. These converters deliver distorted output waveforms.There are trascendental equations characterizing the harmonic content but the degree of thepolynomial increases with the number of DC sources or the number of harmonics to beeliminated. Also, the solutions are discontinuous in some points.In this paper, a way is proposed to minimize the output harmonics of a multilevel inverter,especially those of lower order. The Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm used to minimize theTotal Harmonic Distortion, subject to restrictions on the harmonic content allowed. Theappropriate switching angles can be calculated to eliminate low order harmonics.The proposed method has been succesfully applied to a cascaded multilevel converter of sevenlevels. Then, this method can be extended to more levels inverters. In case of a real-timeapplication, the method can be useful because the switching angles can be stored.