Design and Performance Analysis of a Photovoltaic Water Pumping System based on DC-DC Boost Converter and BLDC Motor

This paper presents the modeling, control and optimization of a photovoltaic water pumping system. The system consists of a DC-DC Boost converter, which is used as a link between a Solar Photovoltaic (SPV) panels and the three-phase inverter (VSI) to feed the BLDC motor. A centrifugal pump is connected to this motor in order to use the water pumped afterwards to multiple applications. Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) control techniques are an essential part of improving the efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) systems. It is principally used to extract maximum possible power of the PV modules under any condition of solar irradiation. For this reason, P&O algorithm is used due to its high performance and its simplicity of implementation. The DC-DC Boost converter, compared to the various common DC-DC converters (Buck, Buck-Boost, SEPIC, Cuk…) has many benefits in SPV based applications, such as limiting the starting current of the motors. Using a BLDC motor is found to be the best option because of its high efficiency and reliability, better performance, and requires low maintenance. The considered system as well as the control strategies has been implemented in MATLAB-Simulink environment. The results show the effectiveness of the studied photovoltaic water pumping system.