A non-isolated MIC for PV application with wide input voltage range

Abstract

ABSTRACT Photovoltaic (PV) systems are widely recognised as one of the most essential renewable energy sources for meeting future energy demands. The use of various multi-input DC–DC converters (MICs) to interface PV systems for output voltage regulation has been reported in the literature. PVs have inherent limitations, such as being extremely sensitive to changes in atmospheric conditions and human design/installation errors. Therefore, output voltage regulation suffers because of wide input voltage variations which have been ignored. In this regard, a novel MIC topology is proposed in this paper and it can operate under wide input voltage variation in buck, boost, and buck-boost modes of operation to achieve desired output voltage. The proposed topology is capable to integrate multiple energy sources and it offers an individual or simultaneous operation of the connected energy sources. Further, it also has additional features including high voltage gain, modularity, and control flexibility. The steady-state and thermal analysis have been presented, as well as a comparison with the state-of-the-art literature to prove the suitability of the proposed topology for PV application. The proposed MIC topology has been validated experimentally with wide input voltage variation.