Power Quality Improvement in a Solar PV Assisted Microgrid Using Upgraded ANN-Based Controller

This paper proposes the design of a controller using the artificial neural network (ANN) for a solar photovoltaic (PV)-fed cascaded multilevel inverter (CMLI) to enhance the power quality. The objective of this presented ANN controller is to obtain a maximum output voltage with no filter components. This paper also investigates and eliminates the voltage harmonics that occurred in a solar-fed cascaded 3-stage inverter using various techniques such as pulse width modulation (PWM), digital logic control (DLC), fuzzy logic controller (FLC), and ANN, and the results are compared. Based on the results, the proposed ANN-based controller efficiently reduces harmonics and improves the power quality. This is achieved by solving the harmonic equations and thereby changing the switching angles of each semiconductor to a minimum value. The ANN is trained by a dataset consisting of varying input voltage and switching angles. The simulation was performed using MATLAB/Simulink for different types of controllers like PWM, DLC, FLC, and ANN for the 3-stage inverter. The simulated results are compared with the results obtained from a 3 kW(p) photovoltaic plant connected to the CMLI. Finally, on the basis of performance analysis, it was confirmed that the ANN-based controller effectively eliminates harmonics and improves the power quality.