Mitigation of Low Frequency AC Ripple in Single-Phase Photovoltaic Power Conditioning Systems

A photovoltaic power conditioning system (PV PCS) that contains single-phase dc/ac inverters tends to draw an ac ripple current at twice the output frequency. Such a ripple current perturbs the operating points of solar cells continuously and it may reduce the efficiency of the current based maximum power point tracking technique (CMPPT). In this paper, the ripple current generation in a dc link and boost inductor is analyzed using the ac equivalent circuit of a dc/dc boost converter. A new feed-forward ripple current compensation method to incorporate a current control loop into a dc/dc converter for ripple reduction is proposed. The proposed feed-forward compensation method is verified by simulation and experimental results. These results show a 41.8 % reduction in the peak-to peak ac ripple. In addition, the dc/ac inverter control system uses an automatic voltage regulation (AVR) function to mitigate the ac ripple voltage effect in the dc link. A 3kW PV PCS prototype has been built and its experimental results are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.