Performance evaluation of a magnetically coupled DC -DC converter for photovoltaic energy systems

Renewable energy resources are an increasingly important part of power generation in the recent years. Solar Energy is one of the most environment friendly power sources available in the world. All the energy stored in Earth's reserves in the form of Coal, Oil and Natural gas is equal to the energy in just 20 days of sunshine. Hence, Solar Energy can be considered as one of the most sustainable of the renewable energies. In this paper PV array (4X4 PV modules) is to be developed in the Matlab-Simulink environment to study the performance of modular (I-V & P-V) characteristics under various working conditions and to design and analyze the proposed Magnetically Coupled DC-DC Converter. Due to the presence of magnetically coupled inductor, higher voltage gain is achieved when compared with the conventional converters and it can be used for high power applications. The proposed Magnetically Coupled Boost converter and PV system are to be designed, modeled, analyzed and simulated using Matlab-Simulink software package.