Design and Implementation of Low Power Smart PV Energy System for Portable Applications Using Synchronous Buck Converter

In this paper, synchronous buck converter based PV energy system for portable applications, especially low power device applications such as charging mobile phone batteries are considered. The converter topology used here is soft switching technique to reduce the switching losses which is found prominently in the conventional buck converter, thus efficiency of the system is improved and the heating of MOSFETs due to switching losses reduce and the MOSFETs have a longer life. The dc power extracted from the PV array is synthesized and modulated by the converter to suit the load requirements. Further, a charging method is studied with controller to regulate the battery voltage and current without overheating. As a result, the charging efficiency can be improved by soft switching technique. Besides, the performance is obtained less number of components and the developed system is cost effective and highly portable. The proposed system is simulated in the MATLAB-Simulink environment and the practical implementation of the proposed converter is done to validate the theoretical results.