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Solar Energy 96 (2013) 187–193
www.elsevier.com/locate/solener

Power conditioning system for grid-connected photovoltaic system

Xin Tang a,⇑, K.M. Tsang b, W.L. Chan b
a
Department of Electrical Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, Hunan 410076, PR China
b
Department of Electrical Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

Received 30 August 2012; received in revised form 10 July 2013; accepted 20 July 2013
Available online 12 August 2013

Communicated by: Associate Editor Elias K. Stefanakos

Abstract

This study develops a new control strategy for an expandable grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system. The proposed system per-
forms dual functions of a PV generation and an active power filter, or either one. To this end, the grid current, instead of output current
of the converter, is shaped to be a sinusoidal current in phase (or opposite phase) with the grid voltage. Furthermore, its reference current
is generated in multiplying the voltage loop controller output by the grid voltage waveform, and therefore non-active components anal-
ysis for harmonics elimination and reactive power compensation in the conventional design is not necessary. As a result, the algorithm is
simple and easy to implement, and only one sensor for current detection plus two voltage sensors are required. Experimental results ver-
ified the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Photovoltaic system; Active power filter; Non-active components analysis

1. Introduction 2009), however, the harmonics and the reactive current

Interest in renewable energy is increasing due to concerns
about global warming, air quality and sustainability. Photo-
voltaic technology is an important technology for the large-
scale adoption of a renewable energy source. The power flow
between the PV array and the grid is often controlled by a
power conditioning system (PCS), which should be reliable
and inexpensive.
An example of single-stage grid-connected PV systems,
which consists of solar array, input capacitor C, single-
phase inverter, filter inductor L, is shown in Fig. 1 (Kim
et al., 2006). To obtain the high-quality power flow, the
output currentiU(t) of PCS is often controlled to be a sinu-
soidal current in opposite phase with the grid voltage vS(t)
(Choi and Lai, 2010; Libo et al., 2007; Kwon et al., 2006;
Gonzalez et al., 2007; Kwon et al., 2008; Kim et al.,
⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Chiling Road 45, Changsha, Hunan
410076, PR China. Tel.: +86 731 82318966.
E-mail address: tangxin_csu@163.com (X. Tang).
produced by the local nonlinear load will inject to the grid.
Consequently, the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the
grid current iS(t) is high and the power factor is low.
In order to solve the problem of power quality produced
by the nonlinear load using the PCS, two independent con-
trollers have been designed for PCS wherein the PV system
can act as a solar generation on sunny days and an active
power filter on rainy days (Kuo et al., 2003). In contrast,
a single controller was designed for the PCS to provide
non-active power of nonlinear load in addition to active
power supply (Calleja and Jimenez, 2004; Koen et al.,
2004; Yu et al., 2005; Tsengenes et al., 2011). In addition,
an alternative harmonic analysis using adaptive neural fil-
tering was developed for a single-phase distributed genera-
tion system to compensate the utility current harmonics
(Cirrincione et al., 2008).
The above distribution generations with integrated
active filter are generally required to measure and analyze
the load current to acquire the information of non-active
power components.

0038-092X/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2013.07.021
188 X. Tang et al. / Solar Energy 96 (2013) 187–193
Fig. 1. A single-stage grid-connected PV system.
Unlike the conventional methods, the proposed method
does not need harmonics analysis. In this paper, a double-
loop with a voltage loop outside an inner current loop is
designed. The grid current, not the output current of PCS
in the aforementioned methods, is controlled to be a sinu-
soidal current in phase (or opposite phase) with the grid
voltage using the repetitive control algorithm. Further-
more, the voltage controller is developed. In the voltage
loop, the reference current is generated in multiplying the
voltage loop controller output by the supply voltage wave-
form. As a result, the algorithm is simple and easy to imple-
ment, and only one sensor for current detection plus two
voltage sensors are required. The experimental results will
be presented to verify the excellent performance of the pro-
posed method.
2. Controller structure
The proposed controller, which is composed of two con-
trol loops, is shown in Fig. 2 where a is a constant, iS(t) is
the grid current and ir(t) is its reference signal, vPV(t) is the
DC bus voltage and vr(t) is its reference signal, Vdc is the
initial voltage and DVdc is the expected change quantity
of the DC voltage computed by the maximum power point
tracking (MPPT) algorithm.
Fig. 2. Controller structure.
Fig. 3. Current, power, and power derivative of the PV array versus
voltage.
The inner loop is the current control loop. Its function is
to shape the grid current into a sinusoidal in phase (or
opposite phase) with the grid voltage. To this end, a cur-
rent sensor is placed at the grid terminals and this current
is used as the feedback signal in the current control loop. It
is worth mentioning that current sensor is not required at
the load terminal or at the filter inductor. In this case,
the load current is seen as a disturbance signal for the grid
current control loop, so, if the current control loop is prop-
erly designed to attenuate its disturbance in a sufficiently
large frequency band then the performance specification
will be achieved in spite of the disturbance phase
characteristic.
The outer control loop is the voltage control loop. Its
main function is to maintain the DC bus voltage close to
the reference value tracking the maximum power point
(MPP). In this manner, controlling the DC voltage level
is equivalent to perform an active power balance for the
whole system. When the solar array injects active power
to the DC capacitor C, it will accumulate the DC voltage
level while the PCS will maintain the voltage level by trans-
mitting the active power to the grid. On the contrary, when
there is no irradiance, the PCS will maintain the voltage le-
vel by absorbing power from the grid for acting as an active
power filter (APF). Since the inner current loop controls
the grid current and its reference is the output of the voltage
controller multiplied by a sinusoidal carrier signal avS(t) in
phase with the grid voltage, it is not necessary to calculate
the harmonics component and the reactive power compo-
nent of the load current and a phase-locked-loop circuit
is not required.
3. MPPT algorithm
The aim of any MPPT algorithm is to extract the
maximum power from the PV array. Usually, the condition
op/ov = 0 is adopted to locate this operating point, i.e., (op/
ov) > 0 means that the operating point is on the left side of
MPP of the P–V characteristic curve shown in Fig. 3 and
(op/ov) < 0 means that the operating point is on the right side
of the P–V characteristic curve.
Based on (Casadei et al., 2006) the MPPT algorithm is
shown in Fig. 4. When (op/ov) > 0, the integrator increases
 X. Tang et al. / Solar Energy 96 (2013) 187–193
Fig. 4. MPPT algorithm.
its output DVdc, and the reference vr(t) moves toward MPP.
On the contrary, when (op/ov) < 0, the integrator decreases
DVdc, and the reference vr(t) moves toward MPP. The rate
of change of vr(t) is set by the gain K determined by the
slope of op/ov at MPP.
4. Current control loop
4.1. Repetitive control
If the reference signal is a periodic signal, conventional
PI is difficult to track the waveform of the input reference
and to eliminate the effects of the disturbance. Repetitive
control (Tsai and Yao, 2002) originated from the internal
model principle provides a solution to eliminate periodic
error occurred in dynamic systems. A repetitive controller
can be viewed as a periodic waveform generator, aug-
mented within the control loop of a control system. That
is a closed-loop regulated by a feedback controller, so that
the periodic error can be eliminated.
In order to remove the error due to the period input and
disturbance of the fundamental and harmonics, a plug-in
repetitive controller (Tang et al., 2011) is adopted as the
current controller. The block diagram representation of
the current loop control is shown in Fig. 5 where ec(t) is
the error between the reference current and the grid cur-
rent, ur(t) is the output of the current controller, vU(t) is
the output voltage of the converter, Gi(s) is the transfer
function of the converter, vS(t) and iL(t), which are the
disturbance in the current loop, are the grid voltage and
the load current respectively. In this paper, the power
converter controlled by voltage-mode control acts as a
voltage amplifier with the transfer function represented
by Gi(s) = Kpwm/(1 + sps), where Kpwm is the ratio of
the DC bus voltage to the amplitude of the carrier signal
of the pulse width module and sp is the time constant deter-
mined by the switching time of the power electronics in the
converter.
Fig. 5. Block diagram of current control loop.
189
The transfer function of the current controller is written
as
U r ðsÞ 1
¼ ð1Þ
Ec ðsÞ 1  K q ðsÞesTd
where Td is the period of the input and Kq(s) is a low-pass
filter. The low-pass filter Kq(s) is used to improve the stabil-
ity of the close-loop system and has free parameters to be
designed.
4.2. Parameters design of current controller
The characteristic equation of the current closed-loop
system is given by
1 þ GO ðsÞ  K q ðsÞesTd ¼ 0 ð2Þ
where GO(s) = Gi(s)/Ls.
Define the regeneration spectrum as
RðwÞ ¼ jK q ðjwÞS O ðjwÞj ð3Þ
where SO(jw) = 1/(1 + GO(jw)) is the sensitivity function of
the original unity feedback system.
It is easy to ensure that 1 + GO(s) = 0 has no zeros on
the right half of the s-plane by adjusting the constant
KPWM. Based on the above condition, if R(w) < 1 for all
w, the closed-loop system of Fig. 5 is stable for all values
of Td. The effect of the free design parameter of Kq(s) on
the stability of the repetitive control system is clearly
illustrated by (3).
Let Kq(s) be a first-order filter with the form
K q ðsÞ ¼ 1=ð1 þ sq sÞ ð4Þ
and its magnitude–frequency characteristics, which satisfy
kK q ðsÞk1 6 1, are shown in Fig. 6 . The magnitude–fre-
quency characteristics of S O ðsÞ, which satisfy kS O ðsÞk1 ¼
M s and jS O ðjws Þj ¼ 1 , are also shown in Fig. 6
From (3), the Kq(s) is designed as
jK q ðjws Þj ¼ j1=ð1 þ jws sq Þj < 1=M s ð5Þ
190 X. Tang et al. / Solar Energy 96 (2013) 187–193

where fnm is the maximum frequency of characteristic har-

monics of the load current which must be eliminated.

5. Voltage control loop

It is known that the whole system is always keeping

active power balance, i.e.
P S ðtÞ ¼ P L ðtÞ þ P U ðtÞ ð13Þ
where PS(t), PL(t) and PU(t) are the average power sup-
plied/absorbed by the grid, consumed by the load and sup-
plied/consumed by the PCS within a fundamental period.
Assuming that the grid current iS(t) can track the refer-
ence signal ir(t) then
iS ðtÞ ¼ ir ðtÞ ¼ avS ðtÞwðtÞ ð14Þ
Fig. 6. Magnitude–frequency characteristics of the sensitivity function where x(t) is the output of the voltage controller. There-
and the low-pass filter. fore, the average power supplied/absorbed by the grid
within a period is written as
Z Z
1 T 1 T
P S ðtÞ ¼ vS ðtÞiS ðtÞ ¼ awðtÞv2S ðtÞ ð15Þ
T 0 T 0
where T is the fundamental period. As the DC voltage
change slowly, x(t) can be considered as a constant within
Fig. 7. Block diagram of voltage control loop.
a period. Therefore, PS(t) can be approximated as
P S ðtÞ  awðtÞV 2S
This characterizes the basic criterion on the stability for where VS is the root-mean-square (RMS) of the grid
design of Kq(s). voltage.
In addition to the stability, it is interest of the tracking Neglecting the power loss of the PCS, the change quan-
performance of the current loop. From Fig. 5, the follow- tity DvPV of the capacitor C is determined by
ing transfer functions are obtained. Z t
1 2
I S ðsÞ Gi ðsÞ ðP U ðtÞ þ P PV ðtÞÞdt ¼ CðV PV þ DvPV ðtÞÞ
Glr ðsÞ ¼ ¼ ð6Þ 0 2
I r ðsÞ sLð1  K q ðsÞesTd Þ þ Gi ðsÞ
1
 CV 2pv ð16Þ
I S ðsÞ 1  K q ðsÞesTd 2
Gls ðsÞ ¼ ¼ ð7Þ
V S ðsÞ sLð1  K q ðsÞesTd Þ þ Gi ðsÞ where PPV(t) is the power generated PV array andVPV is a
I S ðsÞ sLð1  K q ðsÞe Þ sTd constant.Using Laplace transform and neglecting the term
Gll ðsÞ ¼ ¼ ð8Þ Dv2PV ðtÞ, (16) is rewritten as
I L ðsÞ sLð1  K q ðsÞesTd Þ þ Gi ðsÞ
DvPV ðsÞ ¼ ðP U ðsÞ þ P V ðsÞÞ=sCV PV ð17Þ
where Glr(s), Gls(s) and Gll(s) are the transfer function of
the reference current ir(t), the disturbance vs(t) and the dis- The block diagram of the voltage loop is shown in
turbance iL(t), respectively. Fig. 7, where GCV(s) is the transfer function of the voltage
It is known that Kq(s)  1 at 0 6 x < xc where xc is the controller and Gv ðsÞ ¼ 1=sCV PV .
cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter. Using the Euler A classical PI controller is adopted to regulate the DC
Equation of ejx ¼ cos x þ j sin x , we obtains the relation voltage to its reference. Consider a PI controller of the
equations: form
Glr ðsÞ  1 at x ¼ 2pn=T d < xc ; n ¼ 1; 2; 3    ð9Þ KI
GcV ðsÞ ¼ K P þ ð18Þ
s
Gls ðsÞ  0 at x ¼ 2pn=T d < xc ; n ¼ 1; 2; 3    ð10Þ
The voltage loop characteristic equation is given by
Gll ðsÞ  0 at x ¼ 2pn=T d < xc ; n ¼ 1; 2; 3    ð11Þ
DðsÞ ¼ CV PV s2 þ aV 2S K P s þ aV 2S K I ¼ 0 ð19Þ
Thus, to obtain small track error to the reference current
and eliminate the effect of the disturbance, an upon bound with the undamped natural frequency
of sq can be found as rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
aK I
xn ¼ V S ð20Þ
sq ¼ 1=xc < 1=2pfnm ð12Þ CV PV
 X. Tang et al. / Solar Energy 96 (2013) 187–193 191

Table 1 or
Parameters of the PV array.
Parameters
aV 2S K P
n¼ ð21Þ
Rated power 0.5 KW
2xn CV PV
Rated voltage 200 V If the bandwidth of the voltage loop is set to 1/n times
Rated current 2.5 A
Open-circuit voltage 250 V
the supply frequency fv, the integral gain KI becomes
Open-circuit current 3A
ð2pfv Þ2 CV PV
KI ¼ ð22Þ
n2 aV 2S
Table 2 If the damping ratio of the voltage loop is set to one, the
Parameters of the PCS.
proportional gain KP becomes
Parameters
4pfv CV PV
Grid voltage 110 V, 50 Hz KP ¼ ð23Þ
Filter inductor 1 mH naV 2S
IPM module PM15CSJ060
Switching frequency 15 KHz
DC capacitor 470 lF 6. Experimental results
Current control parameters sq ¼ 0:0003
Voltage control parameters n = 10, Kp = 0.6, KI = 10
DSP chip TMS320F2808
To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, an
experimental setup was built and was tested under different
conditions. The following parameters of the PV array were
and the damping ratio is governed by listed in Table 1.
As the voltage of the PV array at MPP always varied
around 200 V, the initial voltage reference Vdc was selected
aV 2S K P as 200 V. To obtain good dynamic performance, the gain K
2nxn ¼
CV PV in MPPT algorithm was set as 1. The Td is selected as 20 ms

Fig. 8. Performance of the proposed system acting as a PV generation alone at low irradiance (a) waveforms (channel 1: the grid voltage, channel 2: the
grid current, channel 4: the DC voltage); and (b) spectrum of the grid current.

Fig. 9. Local nonlinear load (a) waveforms (channel 1: the grid voltage, channel 2: the grid current, channel 4: the DC voltage); and (b) spectrum of the
grid current.
192 X. Tang et al. / Solar Energy 96 (2013) 187–193
Fig. 10. Performance of the proposed system acting as an APF alone (a) waveforms (channel 1: the grid voltage, channel 2: the grid current, channel 4: the
DC voltage); and (b) spectrum of the grid current.
Fig. 11. Performance of the proposed system performing dual functions simultaneously (a) waveforms (channel 1: the grid voltage, channel 2: the grid
current, channel 4: the DC voltage); and (b) spectrum of the grid current.
Fig. 12. Dynamic performance of the proposed system (channel 1: the
grid voltage, channel 2: the grid current, channel 4: the DC voltage).
for the foundational frequency is 50 Hz. Let a be 0.01 such
that the peak value of aVs(t) was about 1.56 V. The setting
ofa was set to make sure that the multiplier output would
not be easily saturated. Since the DC voltage VPV(t) varied
around 200 V, the constant VPV was selected as 200 V. The
other parameters of the PCS were listed in Table 2.
The proposed system, acting as a PV generation alone,
was firstly tested. Fig. 8 shows performance of the PV gen-
eration at low irradiance. The spectrum was obtained from
Fluke 41B. It can be seen that the grid current was sinusoi-
dal and in the opposite phase with the grid voltage. The
RMS grid current was 0.77 A. The power factor of system
was 0.99, and the current THD was 3.71%.
Then, the proposed system, acting as an APF alone, was
tested. Fig. 9 shows the waveform and spectrum of a local
nonlinear load current. The RMS load current was 1.61 A.
There were clearly a lot of high-order harmonics and the
current THD was 61.8%. The power factor was 0.76. After
the proposed system was added, the experimental plot was
shown in Fig. 10. It can be seen that the high-order har-
monics had clearly been reduced and the current THD
was 5.6%. The power factor of overall system was 0.99.
The RMS grid current was 1.92 A (it was greater than
the RMS load current by an amount used to support the
DC voltage of PCS).
Furthermore, the proposed system, which performed
dual functions simultaneously, was tested. Fig. 11 shows
performance of the proposed system with a local nonlinear
load at low irradiance. It can be seen that the proposed sys-
tem effectively performed dual functions. The power factor
of overall system was 0.97. The grid current THD was 6.7%
and its RMS reduced to 0.90 A.
In addition, the dynamic performance of the proposed
system was tested. Fig. 12 shows performance of the pro-
posed system with a sudden change of the irradiance. A
voltage spike was caused by the sudden change of the irra-
diance. As the value of DC voltage going down and the
RMS of the grid current increasing, the proposed system
arrived at another balance point after around 7 cycles.
 X. Tang et al. / Solar Energy 96 (2013) 187–193
7. Conclusion
A novel unified control method for PV system is pro-
posed in this paper. The proposed system can perform dual
functions, acting as a PV generation and as an APF, or
either one. The grid current, which can replace output cur-
rent of the PCS, is controlled in the PV system and can be
shaped to be a sinusoidal current in phase (or opposite
phase) with the grid voltage using a repetitive controller.
The experimental results show that the proposed system
can not only compensate the harmonic current and the
reactive current produced by the local non-linear load,
but also reduce the grid current. Controlling the DC volt-
age level can be equivalent to perform an active power bal-
ance for the whole system, and then, the reference current
can be generated in multiplying the voltage loop controller
output by the grid voltage waveform, and then harmonics
analysis in the conventional design is not necessary.
The apparent power of the proposed system is set to the
square root of sum of square of the maximum active power
of the PV array and reactive power of local nonlinear load.
The reactive power of local nonlinear load can be estimated
since the local load is normally planned and its power fac-
tor can be estimated. So, the power converter is not easy to
overload. It needs to be point out that the redundant
capacity caused by low irradiation may not be efficiently
utilized, however, the capacity of the proposed system is
smaller than the sum of capacities of two independent
equipments – a PV generator and an APF to achieve the
same purpose.
Acknowledgment
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.
51277013).
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