FPGA Contribution in Photovoltaic Pumping Systems: Models of MPPT and DTC-SVM Algorithms

This paper aims to propose and develop a research platform which can be utilized for rapid prototyping of control algorithms of power converters used in the field of renewable energy, such as the photovoltaic systems. This study investigates the use of the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to control the DC/DC power converter and the voltage inverters used in solar photovoltaic pumping systems. The power circuit of the pumping system consists of a PV system, a DC/DC converter, a two-level voltage inverter and an induction motor. The control system is based on an MPPT control algorithm and a Direct Torque Control with a Space Vector Modulation (DTC-SVM) based on proportional-integral controllers. In order to perform the hardware in the loop, the power circuit is realized using the Simulink blocks and the control system is designed using the Xilinx System Generator (XSG) tool. The VHDL code and the bit stream file of the suggested control algorithms have been automatically generated using the XSG tool. The hardware co-simulation step is carried out in the laboratory utilizing an FPGA Virtex 5 ML 507 and the Matlab/Simulink environment. A comparative study between the classical DTC and the DTC-SVM is presented. The FPGA-performance in terms of computation power is demonstrated.