Solar Energy Production - Controlling & Monitoring in the Smart Grid Using Heterogeneous Dual Core
MCU
K .Aarthi(3rd year)
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering,
Vivekanandha College of Technology for Women,
Elayampalayam
Email id: ajiaarthi17@gmail.com
Abstract Energy from renewable sources such as
solar and
wind are gaining interest as the worlds power
demands increase and non-renewable resources
deplete. Solar energy nodes vary in power ratings
from 100-200W micro inverter, 2-3 KW multi string
inverter and Mega watts Central Inverters. With
the renewable content growing as a percentage of the
total utility power, increased control and monitoring of
the power produced, irrespective of the power
ratings, is desired. Control and communication
pose unique challenges on system designs with these
energy nodes. This paper discusses the design of a
smart grid-enabled renewable energy node using a
heterogeneous dual core microcontroller. Real-time
control of extracting the energy from the renewable
source is done on one core and the Ethernet server is
run on the other core. Hardware design for the energy
node to extract maximum power from the solar
panel is discussed along with communication
interface. Software design and integration challenges
for control and communication are presented and
the solution using dual core microcontroller
illustrated.
I. INTRODUCTION
Depleting non renewable sources have raised interest
in sourcing power from renewable and cleaner power
sources. A large component of energy expended in the
world is used by industries and houses that are connected
to the electrical grid. Thus attempts are being made to
raise the percentage of energy sourced from
renewable sources in the grid. Photovoltaic
(PV) energy sources are considered
quintessential factor in increasing this percentage due
to ubiquitous nature of solar power and absence of any
moving parts and hence extended life time. Also as PV
panels can be installed in a distributed way close to
where the energy is consumed for example in
residential, it eliminates
transmission losses.
Feeding power into the grid has its unique set
of challenges, to name a few: the PV panel is a DC source
hence a PV system needs to convert this into AC and feed
into the grid. Therefore inverter technology is
quintessential for success of PV inverters. For the
inverter to feed power into the grid it must maintain a
DC bus greater than the max instantaneous voltage of
the grid, thus a boost stage may be required. Also as PV
shows a unique V vs I characteristics the
U .Priyanga(3rd year)
Department of Electrical and Electronics For Women,
Vivekanandha College of Techology For Women,
Elayampalayam
Email id: santhibuvi1506@gmail.com
installation must make sure that it operates at the
maximum
power point (MPP) of this curve. In addition the current
that the inverter feeds into the grid must be clean and in
phase with the grid. Several disturbances exist on the
grid, like voltage swells and dips, phase jumps and
noise from appliances running etc, thus the system must
be able to estimate the phase of the grid accurately along
with rejecting these disturbances on the grid. This is
typically done using a phase lock loop.
Fig 1 shows a typical PV inverter that feeds power into
the gird. It consists of two stages, one DC-DC stage for
boosting the voltage and tracking the MPP, and DC-AC
stage to feed current into the grid. Depending on the
installation (power rating) several different topologies
have been presented.
When connecting to the grid isolation plays a key factor
in selection of power topology and system design.
Isolation requirements depend on the type of PV Panel
used and the local grid codes. Isolation can be at the grid
connection stage Fig 2 (a), which uses low frequency
transformer. In this case both the boost and the inverter
stages may be controlled using a single
microcontroller. However, low
frequency transformers are heavy, bulky and lossy.
Therefore cannot be used for low power PV inverters. Fig
2 (b) shows PV inverter topology with isolation at high
frequency. Due to the isolation boundary such inverters
use two or more microcontrollers. Transformer less
designs are becoming increasingly popular, as they offer
several advantages with the reduced volume, weight and
also efficiency of the inverter. Fig 2 (c) depicts
transformer less PV inverter where control of both DC-
DC and DC-AC is done using a single controller.
Fig 1 PV Grid Tied Inverter
communication medium, like Zigbee, Ethernet and power
line communication are used to gather information from
the PV installation. Ethernet is particularly a good
choice as an Ethernet server enables control of the unit
remotely (even by the utility) and the number of Ethernet
capable devices like smart phones, laptops, tablets etc is
rising.
However, combining closed loop control of all the
three power stages needed to process power from the PV
panel for a PV system shown in Fig 2 (d) along with
Ethernet stack is challenging. Typically another
controller is then added to perform the communication
tasks in the system. However, this adds additional
challenges to the system design and cost. This paper
discusses construction of a smart grid capable PV
Inverter using a heterogeneous dual core microcontroller
from Texas Instruments (TMS320F28M352HC1), where
the closed loop control of the power processing stages
is done using C28x core, which is optimized for control
tasks, and the Ethernet stack is run on a M3 ARM core.
This offers a single chip solution with a clean partitioning
of the system software for control and communication.
The paper discusses the hardware platform design along
with the control design for the PV Inverter. Challenges of
inter processor communication are discussed and software
design presented.

II. HARDWARE PLATFORM

 which can take different Fig 3 gives a block
forms like LCD screen, diagram of the hardware
Fig 2 PV System web page etc. As the platform designed to
Classification based inverter installation is not implement the PV inverter.
on Isolation in a readily accessible The board is designed to
area a more convenient interface with a 50W
As energy from PV is communication medium solar panel and the power
not available throughout is needed. Different stages designed
the day, energy storage accordingly. The power
with help of battery is rating is kept low so that
added to the PV inverter new users can work with
system. Fig 2 (d) shows a the board to experiment
transformer less PV with PV systems.
inverter with battery
backup where control of all
three stages is done using a
single controller. Thus it
can be observed there is a
growing trend towards
transformer less designs,
especially for residential
PV installations. For
which a single controller
solution is of interest
given the cost sensitivity
of the application.
In addition, with the
renewable content in the
grid increasing,
requirements to control
and monitor the power
generated from these
distributed power
generation units is also
rising. The type of control
and monitoring function
desired from the installation
are currently subject to the
power ratings. For example Fig 3 Solar Explorer
high power central Platform Block
inverters communicate to Diagram
the utility such that the
power can be modulated
dependent on the grid
requirements. On the other
hand in residential
installation impetus is for
the user to be able to see
the energy production,
measure the power, and
for feed in tariffs know
the revenue the PV
installation generates.
Utility interaction for
these installation is gaining
interest with concept of
microgrids and macrogrids
come into play and the
residential distributed
generation units actively
play part in the local grid.
For the user to see
data from PV inverter a
Human Machine
Interface(HMI) is needed,
 Fig 4 Details of Power Stages on the Solar Explorer Board

PV Panels have a unique V vs I characteristics, to

enable understanding and quick development of PV
systems, a low cost panel emulator is integrated on the
board. The panel emulator is based on a DC-DC stage
which is operated in voltage mode. As PV is a light
dependent source the light sensor integrated on the board
can be used to change the look up table curves for the
panel emulator. PV emulator control scheme is shown in
Fig 5.

Fig 5 PV Emulator Control Scheme

 The control of the PV panel emulator is kept separate
from the control of the power processing stages of the PV
inverter. Fig 6 shows the board with the different power
stages marked.
Fig 4 shows the detail of the power stages present on
the board along with sense signals. The board follows a
macro based approach and the input and output of each
power stage is kept in form of connectors, this enables easy
debug of each
stage. Also, the blocks can be connected in different
fashions to implement different PV systems.
III. CONTROL & COMMUNICATION DESIGN
The aim from a PV inverter installation is to
feed maximum power it can into the grid form what is
available from the panel. Fig 7 shows the control
scheme used for the PV inverter.
Fig 6 Solar Explorer
Board
A. DC-DC Boost with MPPT
As shown in Fig 4 a single phase boost stage is used to
boost the voltage from the panel and track the MPP of
the panel.
The input I pv is sensed before the input
current capacitance
along with the panel voltage V pv . These two values are
then
used by the MPPT algorithm. The MPPT is realized using
an outer voltage loop that regulates the input voltage to the
boost stage i.e. the output of the panel, by modulating
the current reference for an inner current loop of the boost
stage, see Fig
7. Increasing the current reference of the boost, i.e.
current drawn through the boost loads the panel and hence
results in the panel output voltage drop. Therefore the
sign for the outer voltage compensator reference and
feedback are reversed.
Fig 7 Control of Grid Tied PV Inverter
It is noted that the output of the boost is not
regulated. However to prevent the output voltage from
rising higher than rating of the components, the
voltage feedback is mapped to the internal comparators
which can do a cycle by cycle trip of the PWM in case of
over voltage.
B. DC-AC Inverter Single
Phase
The PV inverter feeds current into the grid. This
is accomplished by a current loop. Reference for
which is calculated by multiplying the phase of the grid
and the output of the DC Bus regulation loop. The
inverter controller then modulates the duty cycle so as to
get the desired current flow. Eq. (1) gives the relation of the
current fed from the inverter to the grid and the duty applied
at the inverter stage [7].
(Vdc vgrid ).D (0 vgrid )(1 D) Vdc * D vgrid
igrid = + =
Z LCL Fsw ) Z LCL Fsw ) Z LCL Fsw ) (1)
( ( (
Ethernet capable devices. This enables integration of
this smart node into the grid of the future, where the
utility can connect and interact with large number
of distributed resources to keep the grid working and
stable.
IV. HETEROGENEOUS DUAL CORE MCU
With the above discussion, unique challenges of
control and communication in design of PV inverters for
smart grid have become clear. As the switching frequencies
for the power stages being controlled rises, along with
added functionality using a single controller (single cpu)
for both control and communications becomes
complicated. Addition of Ethernet style application layers
adds more complexity to the system design. A typical
way of solving this is to use a two chip solution where
one chip handles the control and the other
communication. Having a two chip solution increases
the complexity of the board and the design along with
increasing the total cost.

The phase is estimated by a phase locked loop [8] and

current reference is only changed around the zero crossing
detection of the AC mains to prevent distortion.
C.
Communication
Information that needs to be communicated to and
from the renewable node can be split into two parts,
Control and Diagnostics. Control information is for
instructing the PV installation to perform certain tasks,
such as starting and stopping production of power.
Diagnostics include the current power production figures,
panel diagnostics etc.
An Ethernet server is run on the communication core Fig 8 Heterogeneous Dual Core MCU (TMS320F28M
of the heterogeneous dual core MCU, details of
which are presented in the next section. This server
enables access to the control and diagnostics of the
energy node from various
Dual core MCU can offer an integrated single chip
solution for such applications, where one core handles
the communication and other core handles the control
tasks. However, using the same core for control and
communication, leads to compromise on performance of
one or the other because control and communication have
different processor requirements. Texas Instruments
TMS320F28M35x series controller are heterogeneous dual
core MCUs which have two different CPU cores on a single
chip [4]. One of the CPU core is the Texas Instruments C28x
which is optimized for control tasks and the other CPU is an
ARM Cortex M3. Fig 8 shows the architecture of the chip.
The control peripherals such as pulse width modulators,
time capture modules etc are mapped to the C28x. The
communication peripherals such as Ethernet and USB are
mapped to the M3 core. A single analog to digital
converter is shared by both the processors. Having ADC
access by both cores with different ISAs adds features of
redundancy in the system, for safety critical checks.
This split of control and communication tasks
and peripherals between the two cores provides a clean
system partitioning. Communication between the two
processors is handled using an Inter Processor
Communication (IPC) peripheral which can configure and
acknowledge interrupts on either core. Data is exchanged
between the two cores with means of shared RAMs.
The shared RAMs allow read accesses from the two
cores but only one core has privileges to write. Fig 9
shows the software structure used to pass messages and
commands between the two CPUs through the shared
RAMs. The IPC peripheral can configure interrupts for
the data to be read immediately and provide
acknowledgement.
Fig 9 Software structure for message passing
V. RESULTS
Fig 10 illustrates the setup used with the
hardware platform, with a step down transformer to step
down the grid voltage, that is used to test the PV inverter
system.
Fig 10 Grid connect setup using Solar Explorer Board
A. PV Inverter under varying light
conditions
a. b.
Fig 11 PV Inverter under different luminance
conditions, Ch1:Grid, Ch2:DC Bus, Ch3: Current
reference, Ch4:PLL
Fig 11 (a) and (b) illustrate the control of the PV
system under varying lighting conditions. It is observed
from Fig 11 (a) & (b) that the DC bus is maintained at a
constant value with changing light conditions, whereas the
current reference for the inverter is changed to match the
reduced power of the panel. This illustrates the working of
the outer DC bus voltage loop and the inner current loop as
in Fig 7.
B. PV Inverter under varying
load
Fig 12 (a) and (b) illustrate the current fed from the
board and the grid voltage, Fig 12(a) shows the grid
current and the inverter current to be in phase, this
implies power from the grid and the solar explorer load is
summed at the load. In Fig
12(d) the local load requirements are reduced, such that
the power from the panel is greater than what is needed
by the local load. Thus the grid current changes phase,
showing current feed into the grid from the board.
a. b.
Fig 12 PV inverter under changing load; Ch1:Grid
Voltage, Ch2: PLL Lock, Ch3:Grid Current, Ch4:
Inverter current
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper system integration challenges for a
PV inverter for smart grid are discussed. The unique
control and communication challenges are described, with a
solution using a heterogeneous dual core MCU presented.
The design of the hardware platform for the PV inverter is
discussed and results of the grid connection under
varying light conditions and loads highlighted.
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