Solar PV Fed Induction Motor Driven Water Pumping System utilizing Quadratic Boost Converter

Abstract

Nowadays, the research is moving toward the solar photovoltaic (SPV) application in remote areas where the grid is not reliable or unavailable. The cost-effective design and size of the system are critical points for any SPV based system design. This paper is focused to present the design of solar photovoltaic fed water pumping system (SPVWPS) utilizing high voltage gain front-end converter. The quadratic boost converter (QBC) is used to step up low SPV voltage to required higher dc voltage level. The ripple current of the QBC is increased with increment in the power level. In the proposed system, the ripple current is reduced by operating multiple QBC in parallel. The QBC are operated with separate maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm to extract maximum power from SPV array. The extracted power is transferred to induction motor (IM) using voltage source inverter (VSI). The VSI is driven by sine-triangular pulse width modulation (SPWM) control. The flux in the machine (v/f ratio) and dc-link voltage are maintained constant by this control under variable atmospheric condition. The effectiveness of the proposed SPVWPS is verified in MATLAB/Simulink environment by providing a step and ramp change in solar irradiation.