Chapter 4 - Power electronics for smart grids

Abstract

Power electronics is the application of electronic circuits in controlling and conversion of electrical energy. For example, in a solar photovoltaic (PV) system, DC power generated by the solar panels is first converted into AC using power electronics inverters to feed the grid and entertain the AC load. The power electronic converter needs a control circuit like a maximum power point tracking algorithm, fuzzy logic-based controller, neural network-based controller, and proportional integral derivative (PID) controller. Raw input is taken from any of the sources like solar PV, wind turbine, battery, fuel cell, utility, or any other source of AC or DC electricity, and is given to the power electronic processing circuit. The power electronic circuit could be a rectifier, converter, inverter, or cycloconverter. These power electronic circuits are controlled by one of the controllers like fuzzy logic-based controller, neural network-based controller, perturb and observe algorithms, incremental conductance algorithm, and PID controller. At the output, the desired voltage, current, power, and frequency are obtained. The following power electronics devices are used for various conversions: AC-DC converters (rectifiers), AC-AC converters (step-up and step-down cycloconverters), DC-DC converters (buck converters, boost converters, buck-boost converters, Cuk, and flyback converters), and DC-AC converters (H-bridge inverters, multilevel inverters).