Fractional-Fuzzy PID Control Approach of Photovoltaic-Wire Feeder System (PV-WFS): Simulation and HIL-Based Experimental Investigation

The utilization of solar photovoltaic (PV) generator as a power source for wire feeder systems (WFSs) of arc welding machines is one of the promising domains in solar PV applications. This article proposes a new type of welding WFS and investigates the PV penetrated energy systems. The proposed system comprises of a solar PV generator, a DC/DC buck converter, and a permanent magnet DC (PMDC) motor. The power of the proposed standalone solar photovoltaic-wire feeder system (PV-WFS) can be widely improved using an intelligent fractional-order fuzzy proportional integral derivative (FO-Fuzzy-PID) regulator based on perturbing and observe (P&O) MPPT method. In this article, a FO-Fuzzy-PID regulator is also designed for a PMDC motor driven welding WFS system. Which will then control the wire feed rate of the welding WFS system. Furthermore, the dynamic reaction of the proposed solar PV-WFS depends on the coefficients of these FO-Fuzzy-PID regulators, which are adjusted by a meta-heuristic tuning algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. The proposed strategy is tested using MATLAB simulations and experimentally verified in real-time on a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing platform using a dSPACE 1104 board-based laboratory setup. Simulation and experimental results are acceptable and demonstrate the effectiveness, precision, stability, and dynamic reaction of the suggested optimized wire feeder regulating system and the considered intelligent P&O MPPT technique.