Impact on Energy Saving of Active Phase Count Control to a DC/DC Converter in a DC Micro Grid

This paper proposes to analyze the impact of active phase count control in DC/DC multi-phase bi-directional interleaved converter dedicated to energy storage system in low voltage DC micro grid for building integrated photovoltaic application. We focus our interest on the energy saved with an adaptive phase count control for real working conditions. To validate our approach a long term analysis was done based on a several years database of photovoltaic production and consumption power profile recorded in our laboratory building. To estimate the impact of our adaptive phase count control we built a model of converter efficiency for a large scale of operating points. Its parameters were identified through experimental measurements made on a bi-phase DC/DC bidirectional converter developed in LAAS-CNRS. Pertinence of APC control is estimated for 5 years simulation process and different load profiles. Results obtained in case of lightning network load profile, show that the energy lost without adaptive phase count control correspond to 4.22% of the energy exchange, against 3.72% with adaptive phase count control. This result correspond to a decrease of looses of 12%. In order to study the impacts on a long term analyze we choose to discuss these results regarding the energy saved with adaptive phase count control. To complete our work we propose a comparative analysis with two different load profiles with details by month and days.