Development of Prototype Fractional Order Controller for a Grid-Tied Photovoltaic System

This brief presents design of a robust fractional order proportional-integral (FO-PI) prototype controller for a grid connected photovoltaic (PV) system. The robustness in face of parameter variation is handled by designing a suitable controller considering sensitivity function, gain margin and phase margin for both inner and outer control loops. As FO-PI controller is not yet available in physical form and due to complexity involved in grid-tied PV system, we propose an alternative way of hardware implementation of inner loop FO-PI controller by using fractor through RC ladder network. Firstly, an emulator circuit of the inner current loop comprising the FO-PI controller (including fractor and the proportional gain) along with the transfer function of inverter and filter is developed and the response is verified through a real-time simulator (OPAL-RT). Finally, the FO-PI part of the emulator circuit is interfaced with the PC target to form a hardware-in-loop (HIL) by employing OPAL-RT. The performance of the complete system is verified through OPAL-RT simulator. The result shows the improved robustness by the proposed control design method.