Mitigation of Photovoltaic Solar System Harmonics using Shunt Active Power Filter

Modern power systems are equipped with green and renewable energy resources; one among them is Photovoltaic solar generating plant. This article aims at extracting maximum power from the solar power plant at various loading conditions, using maximum power point tracking algorithm. Solar plant output is fed to boost converter to enhance the dc output voltage. The increased dc voltage is fed to the three phase five level voltage source inverter to transform dc voltage into ac voltage. Inverter operation introduces harmonics into the system. Hence, this article also focuses on implementation of the active filter to minimize the harmonics introduced by the inverter into the system. The work progresses in two parts, one is stand alone photovoltaic solar system and the second is solar system tied to the grid. The active filter is designed and implemented using MATLAB Simulink for both of the systems to mitigate harmonics. Fast Fourier analysis has been used to obtain the total harmonic distortion in both the systems. The result shows the tremendous improvement in mitigation of system harmonics.