Reconfigurable solar photovoltaic battery charger using a switch matrix

This paper presents a reconfigurable solar photovoltaic (PV) battery charger. A traditional PV charger either utilizes a DC/DC converter between the PV array and load, or it connects the battery directly to the PV array without any power conversion. Different from these approaches, our proposed PV charger avoids conventional DC/DC converters by using a reconfigurable switch matrix. This switch matrix can configure the PV array automatically into optimal series-parallel configuration to charge batteries with different voltage ratings.