Abstract
The increase in global energy demand has led to increased research in harvesting solar energy. Solar energy is widely used in homes, electric vehicles and is a great solution to power remote areas. DC–DC converters are essential in extracting power from solar panels. One of the main problems in designing converters for solar energy applications is boosting the low output voltage of the solar panel to meaningful levels. While there are several topologies to achieve high gain, some of the problems faced by them are the extreme duty ratio, complex design and discontinuous input current. This paper presents a novel topology that uses an interleaved input, a voltage lift capacitor and a hybrid switched capacitor network to achieve high gain without an extreme duty ratio or bulky magnetics. The proposed converter is controlled using a microcontroller which regulates the output voltage. The voltage lift capacitor and the switched capacitor network enhances the voltage gain over a conventional boost converter without an extreme duty ratio. The analysis and design of the proposed converter are presented and verified with a 100 W prototype. The results show that the converter provides a gain of 10, at a duty ratio of 30%, while delivering the designed output power with considerably high efficiency.
Highlights
DC–DC converters are essential in extracting power from solar panels
Interleaved boost converters are a popular branch of boost converters for photovoltaic applications. They use a multiphase phase-displaced input which serves to reduce the input current fluctuations, which are important for photovoltaic applications [24,25,26]. Though these converters addressed the issue of input current ripple and showed promising results in managing the effects caused by partial shading, the voltage gain provided by an interleaved network was still identical to a classical boost converter [27,28]
This paper presents a novel interleaved converter using a switched capacitor network
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. They use a multiphase phase-displaced input which serves to reduce the input current fluctuations, which are important for photovoltaic applications [24,25,26] Though these converters addressed the issue of input current ripple and showed promising results in managing the effects caused by partial shading, the voltage gain provided by an interleaved network was still identical to a classical boost converter [27,28]. In [31], a zero-voltage switched interleaved boost converter with an active clamping circuit is presented This converter provided a gain of 2×1−ND+2 where N is the turns ratio of the coupled inductors and D is the duty. The details of the topology and its operations are discussed subsequently
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