Voltage Tracking of PV with a Nonlinear Controller in DC Microgrid: An Experimental Verification Using Hardware-in-the-Loop

The Photovoltaic (PV) energy conversion is susceptible to fluctuations determined by the operating point of the cells employed. These variations in the output voltage impact the overall efficiency of the array when directly linked to the load. In this paper, the authors focus on a system that seamlessly integrates a renewable energy source, precisely a PV source, with the power system through a Non-Inverting Buck-Boost converter. To control the voltage, a sliding mode-based nonlinear controller has been implemented to track the photovoltaic source at different power points. The proposed control strategy allows for fulfilling the voltage regulation requirements defined by the user from a SCADA in real-time. The proposed nonlinear controller has been modelled on Typhoon Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Schematic Editor (2023) and simulated on Typhoon HIL SCADA (2023) to verify the performance of the designed framework. The results obtained from diverse simulation scenarios are presented, providing insights into the overall performance of the proposed system.