Development of DC-DC Converter for Low-Power Solar Energy Harvesting

Lim, Jian Hau (2016) Development of DC-DC Converter for Low-Power Solar Energy Harvesting. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

Text Lim Jian Hau.pdf Restricted to Registered users only Download (2MB)

Abstract

Solar cells convert solar energy from sunlight into electricity, which can be used to power low power and embedded electronic devices. The development of high performance power electronic dc-dc converter has made the low power solar energy harvesting become possible. However, the efficiency of conventional boost converter is low due to high switching loss, forward voltage drops and losses from capacitor and inductor. Different topologies have been developed to solve these problems to increase efficiency. This study presents a simulation comparison between different topologies which are conventional boost converter, interleaved boost converter, synchronous boost converter and two-stage boost converter. Synchronous boost converter topology is selected because the diode with significant power loss from forward voltage drop is replaced by a MOSFET with low RDS, hence greatly increase the efficiency to 90.71%. Experimental comparison was done on the synchronous boost converter as compared to conventional boost converter to verify the accuracy of PSpice simulation. Besides, a MPPT algorithm with perturb & observe technique was used to maximize the energy harvested from solar panel. A prototype was developed to implement the solar charger using synchronous boost converter with P&O algorithm. A charging current of 50 mA is obtained under a 60 W light bulb. The solar charger produces a 5 V output which can be used to charge portable USB powered devices.