Optimized design of a photovoltaic cathodic protection

الملخص EN

Among the large number of photovoltaic applications, we are interested in the cathodic protection ; it’s one of the most widely used methods for corrosion prevention, mainly in the oil and gas industries.

In this paper, we report on our study of the design of a voltage regulator with variable output and maximum power point tracker (MPPT) for solar photovoltaic cathodic protection.

The system is based on two microcontroller controlled DC / DC converters.

The first one is a buck used to match the maximum power point voltage of the solar panel to the battery charging voltage ; and the second one is a buckboost used between the batteries and the load in order to adapt the regulator for all cases of the cathodic protection systems.

Usually, cathodic protection systems are working with constant current output, which is the necessary condition to procure immunity voltage to the structures, thus preventing corrosion from occurring.

In our case, the system is carried out by an automatic adjustment of the output voltage of the adapter, which is the buck-boost DC / DC converter, by means of the microcontroller by generating the required duty cycle by way of its pulse width modulation (PWM) output port.

In this paper, a study of an optimum design of this voltage regulator with variable output for solar photovoltaic cathodic protection has been carried out.