Passivity-Based Control for a Photovoltaic Inverter with Power Factor Correction and Night Operation

The use of photovoltaic systems connected to electrical grid for industrial, commercial, and residential facilities has been increasing. These systems require power converters to manage the energy converted by the photovoltaic panels. However, their operation depends on the presence of solar irradiance. In addition, the role of these converters has been limited to inject active power to the grid without considering power quality capabilities in electric facilities. In this work a double-loop control scheme is presented to facilitate this improvement. This scheme enables in the inverter the additional function of compensating reactive power from inductive-resistive loads to improve the power factor independently of the energy converted by photovoltaic panels. The system performance, with the proposed control algorithm, is verified by computational simulations using MATLAB/Simulink.