Cascaded Current-Voltage Control to Improve the Power Quality for a Grid-Connected Inverter With a Local Load

In this paper, a cascaded current-voltage control strategy is proposed for inverters to simultaneously improve the power quality of the inverter local load voltage and the current exchanged with the grid. It also enables seamless transfer of the operation mode from stand-alone to grid-connected or vice versa. The control scheme includes an inner voltage loop and an outer current loop, with both controllers designed using the H-infinity repetitive control strategy. This leads to a very low total harmonic distortion in both the inverter local load voltage and the current exchanged with the grid at the same time. The proposed control strategy can be used to single-phase inverters and three-phase four-wire inverters. It enables grid-connected inverters to inject balanced clean currents to the grid even when the local loads (if any) are unbalanced and/or nonlinear. Experiments under different scenarios, with comparisons made to the current repetitive controller replaced with a current proportional-resonant controller, are presented to demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed strategy.