Abstract
Solar cells convert sun light into electricity, but have the major drawbacks of high initial cost, low photo-conversion efficiency and intermittency. The current-voltage characteristics of the solar cells depend on solar insolation level and temperature, which lead to the variation of the maximum power point (MPP). Herein, to improve photovoltaic (PV) system efficiency, and increase the lifetime of the battery, a microcontroller-based battery charge controller with maximum power point tracker (MPPT) is designed for harvesting the maximum power available from the PV system under given insolation and temperature conditions. Among different MPPT techniques, perturb and observe (P&O) technique gives excellent results and thus is used. This work involves the design of MPPT charge controller using DC/DC buck converter and microcontroller. A prototype MPPT charge controller is tested with a 200 W PV panel and lead acid battery. The results show that the designed MPPT controller improves the efficiency of the PV panel when compared to conventional charge controllers.
Highlights
Solar energy is one of the most important renewable energy resources because it is inexhaustible and eco-friendly, and has been used to provide light, heat and electricity [1, 2]
The results show that such type of maximum power point tracker (MPPT) controller improves the efficiency of PV panels when compared to conventional charge controllers
Compared to the conventional charge controller, the developed MPPT charge controller significantly improve efficiency for each of the test time. These results prove that maximum power is harvested from the PV module by using the MPPT charge controller
Summary
Solar energy is one of the most important renewable energy resources because it is inexhaustible and eco-friendly, and has been used to provide light, heat and electricity [1, 2]. Solar PV modules have two major problems of low efficiency and intermittency, i.e. their efficiency of converting sun light into electric power is generally less than 17%, and the generated electric power changes with weather conditions [3,4,5]. In stand-alone solar PV systems, the PV modules and batteries are the most expensive components. When the batteries are directly connected to the PV modules, there is no protection against overcharging and battery life-span decreases. To protect batteries from overcharging charge controllers can be used, though conventional charge controllers do not operate PV modules at MPP, resulting in lower efficiency. It is desirable to operate the PV module at peak power point to deliver maximum power to the batteries
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