Design and implementation of synchronous buck converter based PV energy system for battery charging applications

Abstract

The Photo Voltaic (PV) energy system is a very new concept in use, which is gaining popularity due to increasing importance to research on alternative sources of energy over depletion of the conventional fossil fuels world-wide. The systems are being developed to extract energy from the sun in the most efficient manner and suit them to the available loads without affecting their performance.
In this project, synchronous buck converter based PV energy system for portable applications; especially low power device applications such as charging mobile phone batteries are considered. Here, the converter topology used uses soft switching technique to reduce the switching losses which is found prominently in the conventional buck converter, thus efficiency of the system is improved and the heating of MOSFETs due to switching losses reduce and the MOSFETs have a longer life. The DC power extracted from the PV array is synthesized and modulated by the converter to suit the load requirements. Further, the comparative study between the proposed synchronous buck converter and the conventional buck converter is analysed in terms of efficiency improvement and switching loss reduction.
The proposed system is simulated in the MATLAB-Simulink environment and the practical implementation of the proposed converter is done to validate the theoretical results. Open-loop control of synchronous buck converter based PV energy system is realised through ICs and experimental results were observed.