Study of a photovoltaic inverter for reactive and harmonic control and compensation

This dissertation presents the development and computational simulations of a 2.0 kVA photovoltaic inverter for the control of the reactive power in the distribution network, so that there is active power factor compensation and an increase in the quality of the energy at the installation site plant. In order to reach this objective, the MATLAB/Simulink® development environment was used to control the active power by adjusting the angle between the grid voltage and the voltage generated by the inverter, by means of the potential balance of the DC (from the photovoltaic generator). The reactive power, in turn, was adjusted by the amplitude of the voltage of the coupling point of a local load. In addition, resonant-proportional controllers were used in the voltage and current loops of the three-phase converter, in order to mitigate the harmonic currents of non-linear loads that may depreciate the power factor. A full-bridge, full-bridge boost converter with nominal power of 1.8 kW was also implemented, responsible for tracking the maximum power point of the photovoltaic modules. The results obtained allowed the evaluation of the performance of the controllers and the observation of the conservation by the inverter of the power factor of the network close to the unit for situations with marked variations of the load and the solar irradiation, as well as for the cases with the presence of loads in the system. Thus, the voltage profile delivered to the load is approximately sinusoidal, with low harmonic distortion. (AU)