The article entitled On the tuning and performance of Stand-Alone Large-Power PV irrigation systems, written by QPV, the Instituto de EnergÃa Solar and the University of Malaga, has been published in the scientific journal Energy Conversion and Management: X. This article is a contribution, on the one hand, to the systematic tuning of high-power PV irrigation control systems and, on the other hand, to the knowledge of their experimental performance data.
Battery-less, isolated high-power PV irrigation systems are a recent innovation. This means that their design has not yet reached maturity and that there is no experimental data on their performance. The article is a contribution, on the one hand, to the systematic tuning of the control systems of this type of systems and, on the other hand, to the knowledge of their experimental performance data.
A systematic Proportional, Integral and Derivative (PID) method of frequency inverter control tuning, based on the application of the AMIGO method rules, is proposed and has been used in two PV irrigation systems located, respectively, in Villena and Aldeanueva de Ebro, Spain, which had been previously tuned “conservatively” using a trial-and-error experimental method.
To evaluate the goodness of this systematic tuning, the performance of the two systems has been analyzed from 2017 to 2021. New indexes have been proposed to measure the robustness of the system against PV power fluctuations (the Number of abrupt stops and the Cloud Step Resistance Index) and the performance (factoring the traditional Performance Ratio (PR) to distinguish the influence of different factors external to the PV system). The results show an improvement of the percentage of abrupt stops of both systems from 40% and 39.8% before systematic tuning to 7.3% and 1.3%, respectively, after tuning; the Cloud Passage Resistance Index increases from 65% and 79% to 97.9% and 99.8% and the PR from 61.4% and 60% to 65.7% and 64.7%.