Abstract:
Power electronic converters play the role of
power conditioning unit in solar energy to electrical
energy conversion for voltage conversion and acquiring
the maximum power from the photovoltaic array. Z-H
converters are the recently introduced power converters
with buck and boost capability. They extend a greater
range of output voltage, provide high reliability and
reduce ripple and in-rush currents in the circuits. So, they
can perform as power conditioning units and render better
results compared to conventional power converters.
Moreover, Z-H converter does not need the front end
diode as compared to the basic Z-source converter without
compromising the performance under buck and boost
operations. The operating principle with equivalent
circuits and the steady state analysis are provided. A 37W
solar panel with 36 series connected cells is taken in this
work for simulation and implementation. A 300W
photovoltaic array is developed from these panels and
integrated with Z-H converter. A simple maximum power
point tracking technique using perturb and observe
algorithm is proposed to extract maximum power from the
photovoltaic array at any operating conditions. The
complete system is modeled and simulated using MATLAB.
Also the proposed concepts are verified experimentally
using a laboratory prototype.
