A novel optimally tuned super twisting sliding mode controller for active and reactive power control in grid-interfaced photovoltaic system

In photovoltaic (PV) systems, inverters play a crucial role for supplying electricity to meet the demand while maintaining power quality. For a local load connected to a grid-interfaced photovoltaic (GIPV) system, active and reactive power control is necessary at the distribution level. Thus, the foremost purpose of this article is to get the best optimally designed robust controller for control of active and reactive power. A GIPV system with Improved Arithmetic Optimisation Algorithm (IAOA)-based Super Twisting Sliding Mode Controller (ST-SMC) methodology has been proposed in this article for active and reactive power management. The conventional PI controller in the GIPV system that is most frequently used has considerable undershoot and a long settling period. PI controller tuning parameters were also changed to account for the wide change in the reference pattern. Therefore, STSMC and SMC are used for ensuring robustness against external disturbances. The conventional SMC comes out to have a chattering issue. Furthermore, the proposed IAOA technique is validated through some benchmark functions. The proposed IAOA technique outperforms Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO), Forensic Based Investigation (FBI), and Traditional Arithmetic Optimisation Algorithm (TAOA) in terms of the number of iterations and accurately achieving optimal solutions for active and reactive power control. The results show that the proposed IAOA-based STSMC technique has an improved performance of settling time and undershoot for active and reactive power control. This article also presents stability analysis and robustness test of the above mentioned controllers to illustrate the effectiveness of each optimally designed controller. A 40 kW GIPV system performance is evaluated using the MATLAB environment, and the results are validated in a real-time simulator platform OPAL-RT 4510.