Optimization of Voltage Source Inverter’s Controllers Using Salp Swarm Algorithm in Grid Connected Photovoltaic System

Photovoltaic system is one of the most important sources of renewable energy that may overcome the growing demands of energy. In grid connected mode of operation, variation of voltage and frequency shouldn’t be allowed and needs fine tuning to ensure high power quality. Therefore, controlling voltage source inverter (VSI) in PV system accurately is a crucial issue. Applying novel techniques to estimate the parameters of proportional integral (PI) controllers of VSI optimally is an important point of interest of the researchers to increase the efficiency and the reliability of these controllers which may lead in turn to improve the power quality. Meta-heuristic algorithms are proposed recently as very powerful novel techniques for optimization problems. Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is selected for PI parameters estimation as it is one of the latest published nature inspired algorithms that achieves high accuracy in nonlinear applications. The proposed algorithm is tested and validated on a selected grid connected PV model. Moreover, its results are compared with those of the other commonly used techniques as Particle Swarm optimizer (PSO) and Ant Colony optimizer (ACO) based on the same objective function to prove its accuracy and validity.