Simulation of Grid Connected Photovoltaic System With Maximum Power Point Tracking

Abstract

Solar renewable energy harvesting is the demand of the century because of the huge energy requirement of the world today. India being a home to a huge population witnesses high Incident Solar radiations throughout the year. Planning has been made to produce at least 20 Gigawatts of high quality solar power by the year 2020. Energy harvested from the sun is a necessarily a valuable source but still most it part goes unutilised in Indian subcontinent although being a tropical region. The main obstacle for the wide usage of solar Photovoltaic systems is their efficiency which is very low (20-25% for single crystal 10-15% for polycrystalline and 3-5% for amorphous silicon solar cells) and high cost of manufacturing. In main objective behind the work in this thesis lies in extracting maximum harvestable power from a Photovoltaic module and use the energy for a DC application as well as the grid connection of the generated power so that the surplus power unutilised in the load can be transferred to the grid. Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT), use of Boost converter and the importance of bridge inverter have been the main investigation in this project. Also the grid connection along with supply to a three phase load using bridge inverter and PWM has been shown. First SIMULINK software is used to model the photovoltaic cell. Then MPPT interfacing is done with a boost converter and resistive load and finally through an inverter connected to the 3 phase grid. All simulations have been done in SIMULINK software of MATLAB