Digital Control Of Solar Photovoltaic Converters

A photo-voltaic system consists of solar cells, power converters, battery and the load. The power converter interfaces the solar cells, battery and the load. The battery serves to equalise the energy demand (load) and the energy supply (solar cell). Currently the solar cells and the battery cost nearly 90% of the system cost. A typical photo-voltaic system can adopt various power bus configurations. Battery tied bus is the simplest of the power bus configurations. In this topology, the battery is always attached to the bus. This system is extremely simple in terms of power circuit configuration as well as control. Such systems weigh less and are more reliable. However, the battery tied bus suffers certain disadvantages. The first among them is the poor utilisation of solar panels. The load has to tolerate the full swing of the battery voltage variation. On account of the constraint on the solar panel voltage, the solar panels may not be loaded to the maximum power capacity. Such operating conditions lead to gross under-utilisation of the expensive solar panels. The battery tied bus configuration is designed, built and evaluated experimentally with 4 solar panels rated at 35 W each and a lead acid battery of 12 V 42 AH rating. This thesis explores alternate power architecture to overcome the above limitations. Load regulation and maximum power harvesting from the solar panels are the objectives. In the proposed configuration, a bidirectional power converter is inserted between the bus and the battery. The bidirectional power converter operates in boost mode and charges the battery when the sunlight is available. During eclipse period, it operates in buck mode and meets the load demand. The maximum power is extracted from the panels by controlling the voltage across the solar panels. The bus voltage reference is computed by MPPT block and the bus voltage is regulated to the reference voltage through closed loop control. So the maximum power is extracted from the panels at the expense of extra bidirectional power converter. Even though there is an additional power loss due to the introduction of power converter, this power bus configuration is superior because it increases the output power from the panel itself. The entire control logic implementation is done digitally using dspic30F6010A. The simulation is done by writing script files in C language. The proposed bus configuration is designed, built and evaluated experimentally with the same setup and the results are then compared