Design and Implementation of PV Fed Local UPS Inverter

Abstract

Locally manufactured Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units are purchased as an alternative to rolling blackouts and load shedding in underdeveloped and developing countries like Pakistan. These locally manufactured UPS units are energy-inefficient, causing stress on the national grid and cost-intensive for the residential consumer in the form of high utility bills of electricity. In this regard, the authors have proposed the PV fed local UPS inverter to make the existing UPS unit more efficient through photovoltaic (PV) energy without disrupting its function of providing uninterrupted supply during load-shedding hours. In order to validate the performance of the proposed PV fed local UPS inverter, the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) PV charge controller module is designed and implemented practically in a hardware setup and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink and Proteus environment, respectively. Moreover, the installation of an MPPT PV charge controller module in an existing locally manufactured UPS unit is also discussed. The practical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PV fed local UPS inverter with an average efficiency of 81.51% and a lowest total harmonic distortion (THD) of 1.29% as compared to existing UPS inverters.