Standalone Solar Photovoltaic Fed Automatic Voltage Regulator for Voltage Control of Synchronous Generator

The aim of this paper is to model standalone solar PV fed Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) for controlling the synchronous machine output voltage. The objective of AVR is to sense the output voltage of synchronous machine, alters the field current fed with DC supply and maintain the output terminal voltage constant when load changes. Normally, the DC voltage is given from an additional DC source to the field of the synchronous generator. As solar power is cost free fuel energy; in this work solar power is used to change the field excitation of synchronous machine and excess output power from solar is fed to battery to maintain power balance. Perturb and Observe (P&O) method is used to extract maximum power from solar PV cell through boost converter and buck converter is used to regulate the field current across the generator. The performance of the solar fed AVR to the synchronous machine connected to load is developed and analyzed using MATLAB/Simulink.