Modeling a residential grid-connected PV system with battery–supercapacitor storage: Control design and stability analysis

Abstract

The increased penetration of renewables and the variable behavior of solar irradiation makes the energy storage important for overcoming several stability issues that arise in the power network. The current paper examines the design and stability analysis of a grid-connected residential photovoltaic (PV) system with battery–supercapacitor hybrid energy storage. The battery and supercapacitor packs are connected to the common 400 V DC-bus in a fully active parallel configuration through two bidirectional DC–DC converters, hence they have different voltage levels and their power flow is controlled separately. A detailed small-signal stability analysis is considered for the design of the current controllers for the bidirectional converters of the battery and supercapacitor. An important contribution here is that a detailed stability analysis is performed for both the boost and the buck mode of operation for the battery and supercapacitor converters, resulting in more accurate tuning of the controllers. Moreover, the small-signal stability analysis of the voltage source inverter (VSI) is considered in order to design the DC-bus voltage controller, where a reference output current is obtained using a phase-locked loop (PLL) for grid synchronization. The proposed model is developed and simulated in the MATLAB/Simulink software environment, based on mathematical analysis and average modeling. The simulation results verify the dynamic performance of the proposed model, through several rapid changes in PV generation and in load demand. Also, the model works properly and responds extremely fast during different mode transitions, exhibiting a very fast DC-bus voltage regulation with a very small ripple voltage (a maximum of ± 0.625%). Finally, the supercapacitor handles the rapid changes occurring within 0.2 s, hence this can relieve the battery stress and extend the battery lifetime.

Keywords

• Photovoltaics
• Battery
• Supercapacitor
• Hybrid storage
• DC–DC bidirectional converter
• Voltage source inverter