New Optimized Control of Cascaded Multilevel Converters for Grid Tied Photovoltaic Power Generation

This paper proposes a new optimized control of photovoltaic two stages conversion cascade composed by Three Levels Boost (TLB) and Three Levels Neutral Point Clamped (TLNPC) inverter. In order to extract the maximum power from photovoltaic generator and get a balanced DC bus voltage, the duty cycles of the two TLB switches are determinate from a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) for the first switch and by adding to the first duty cycle an additional duty cycle obtained by integration of the error between the two capacitors voltages of DC bus. Balancing the bus voltages by the TLB using a single regulator avoid us to use a complex balancing algorithm by the redundant vectors of TLNPC inverter. For the control of the inverter, we used a Proportional Integral (PI) regulator optimized by PSO. This command allows us to have on one side a constant DC bus voltage and a current injection in phase with the grid voltage. To have an efficient follow-up of the TLNPC inverter reference voltages, the Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (SVPWM) is applied. The simulation is carried out in MATLAB/SIMULINK platform. The results obtained from the application of the FLC command associated with PI PSO are better compared to the simulation without optimization in terms of sum of the absolute values of the errors at the inputs of the three PI regulators.