Control scheme for photovoltaic three-phase inverters to minimize peak currents during unbalanced grid-voltage sags

Abstract

Nowadays, the majority of the photovoltaic (PV) power sources are connected to the public grid. One of the main connection problems occurs when voltage sags appear in the grid due to short circuits, lightning, etc. International standards regulate the grid connection of PV systems, forcing the source to remain connected during short-time grid-voltage faults. As a consequence, during the voltage sag, the source should operate with increasing converter currents to maintain the injection of the generated power. This abnormal operation may result in nondesired system disconnections due to overcurrents. This paper proposes a controller for a PV three-phase inverter that ensuresminimum peak values in the grid-injected currents, as compared with conventional controllers. From the system analysis, a design method is presented in order to set the parameters of the control scheme. Selected experimental results are reported in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control.