Photovoltaic System Transient Load Characteristic for Converter Design in Solar Microgrid

In islanded microgrid systems, it is critical to observe that how the system handles the sudden load change situation which is also known as transients. In islanded microgrid system, during a sudden load increase situation, the power should flow instantaneously from the back up sources, to maintain the synchronism (stability) in the system. In this paper, the transient characteristics of the microgrid consisting of photovoltaic generator as the power source are obtained by changing the load in the system in steps and logging the values of PV system power, voltage and current. The transient characteristics are plotted by observing the change in the value of quantity (can be PV power, voltage or current) w.r.t time against the number of samples, whereas, a particular sample corresponds to an event of change in system load. These transient characteristics help in a) Designing the power converters for interfacing distributed generation (DG) sources with the microgrid and b) Maintaining the microgrid stability under transient conditions. The simulation results obtained in the SIMULINK toolbox of MATLAB are used for plotting the transient load characteristics.