Mitigating Misfire and Fire-through Faults in Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems Utilizing Dynamic Voltage Restorer

Abstract

Recently, there was a great focus on integrating renewable energy sources (RESs) into electrical power systems (hybrid systems) due to their many environmental and economic advantages. The output of most of these RESs is DC; some power electronic devices, including inverters, must be used to integrate these RESs into the electrical grid. Any maloperation, faults, or improper control in these power electronic devices will enormously affect these hybrid systems’ performance. This paper aims to mitigate the misfire and fire-through faults that occur at the switching of the inverter that connects three renewable sources: PV, wind, and the fuel cell to the grid. This mitigation of such inverter faults (misfire and fire-through) is performed through optimal tuning of the PI controller driving a dynamic voltage restorer (DVR) connected at the system’s AC side. The optimization technique used is particle swarm optimization (PSO). While mitigating these two inverter faults using the PI-PSO controller for the DVR, improved system performance through voltages, currents, and powers waveforms is achieved. Besides, the three renewable sources were kept in continuous operation without disconnection from the system during these faults.