Efficient operation of photovoltaic-interfaced reduced switch 11-level inverter using adaptive swarm-based metaheuristic

In light of current research challenges on efficient photovoltaic (PV) interfaced multilevel inverter (MLI) systems, this article proposes a PV interfaced reduced switch 11-level MLI (PVRS11MLI) system. Two essential aspects in terms of functionality of the PVRS11MLI system have been improved. Firstly, an efficient and resilient maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique that extracts the maximum feasible power from the PV array under both Uniform Irradiance (UI) and Partial Shading (PS) conditions, has been developed. Secondly, the RS11MLI's firing angles have been optimized to produce high-quality AC voltage output along with minimizing total harmonic distortion (THD). To achieve this aim, a control parameter-based self-adaptive particle swarm optimization (SAPSO) technique is introduced to resolve both MPPT and firing angle optimization (FAO) problems. In these applications, the performance of the SAPSO technique is compared with other state-of-the-art techniques. Such comparative analysis ensures the superiority of the SAPSO technique over other contemporary techniques using power tracking efficiency, settling time, tracking time (in MPPT), and statistical tests (in FAO). Moreover, the proposed MLI topology has been compared with other contemporary 11-level RSMLI topologies in terms of the number of component requirements. The proposed system is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK; whereas, the DC power generation and the DC-AC conversion stages of the proposed system are separately validated using hardware setup and hardware in loop (HIL), respectively. All simulated and real-time validated results envisage that the SAPSO technique can be treated as a one-stop solving approach to maximization (MPPT) and minimization (FAO) problems simultaneously with noteworthy accuracy.