Model Predictive Control of a Single-Phase Single-Stage Grid-Connected PV System with LCL Filter and Reduced Sensors Number

Ruggedness, reliability while ensuring the highest possible efficiency, the lowest cost and keeping a superior performance are the main desirable characteristics of grid-connected photovoltaic systems. This has led to the development of several grid-connected PV systems topologies whose purposes are: (i) ensuring PV maximum power extraction (ii) DC-Link voltage regulation to guarantee balanced power exchange (iii) injection of grid current while maintaining prescribed Total Harmonic Distortion and power factor. Such topologies usually require the use of many voltage and current sensors in addition to a complex control strategy. With a view to reduce the system cost and control complexity, this paper proposes a sensorless Model Predictive Control based control strategy of a single-stage single-phase grid-connected photovoltaic system. Unlike other control methods, the proposed control scheme requires less number of sensor (two): only one current sensor and one voltage sensor to that required (five) in other control strategies. Detailed analysis and development of the sensorless multiloop control scheme are presented. The performance of the proposed technique is confirmed by means of simulation results under different environmental conditions in MATLAB/Simulink.