Experimental Study of Active and Reactive Power Control in a Grid-Connected Photovoltaic System Using an Optimally tuned Sliding Mode Controller

At the distribution level, active and reactive power control is needed for a local load integrated to a grid-connected photovoltaic (GCPV) system. This article proposes a GCPV system for managing active and reactive power through Improved Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (IAOA) based Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) and Proportional-Integral (PI) technique. The conventional PI controller that is utilized in GCPV system has a significant undershoot and a long settling period that needs modification for each change in the reference pattern. SMC is therefore used to guarantee robustness against external disruptions. It is improved by implementing the IAOA based SMC technique, which results in increased performance for active and reactive power control in terms of settling time and undershoot. In comparison to IAOA-SMC, for management of active and reactive power has a settling time of 1.02 sec with undershoot of 1.86% and settling time of 0.05 sec with undershoot of 2.5 % respectively whereas IAOA-PI for active and reactive power control has a settling time of 2.51 sec with undershoot of 3.63% and settling time of 1.95 sec with undershoot of 98.83 % respectively. As a result, it can be said that the IAOA-based SMC controller performs more dynamically than PI. The MATLAB environment serves as the platform to evaluate the operation of a GCPV system and OPAL-RT 4510 real-time simulator has been utilized for experimental validation.