Solar energy conversion using isolated soft switching buck boost converter for domestic applications

Dependence on renewable energy systems is the best solution available that caters to both the increasing energy demand and the maintenance of a clean environment. Out of the renewable energy sources available, solar energy is a promising candidate for tropical regions since the availability is abundant. This paper proposes a stand alone PV system with an isolated buck boost converter with a partial resonant circuit that uses the DC generated from the solar panel and processes this to a required DC level to cater multiple DC loads at home so that any intermediate converter can be eliminated and thus increasing the overall efficiency of the system. Hourly cloudless solar radiation data has been used to provide insolation data in the model which is calculated from geographic location data. The MPPT technique considered in the work is the Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm. The work has successfully developed the MATLAB/SIMULINK model of the proposed PV system. An experiment was carried out to feed multiple loads from the proposed converter. All simulation results of the proposed model matches with the experimental results.