Performance enhancement of photovoltaic system using soft switched multi-phase boost converter

Abstract EN

The state of art in photovoltaic (PV) power conversion system includes the reduction of ripples at the input side to increase the life of the PV array as well to extract the maximum power from it for increasing system efficiency.

To address these issues, this paper presents the soft switching multi-phase boost converter and modified maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm.

The modified MPPT algorithm presented in this paper is capable of tracking multiple peaks which is the common scenario in partial shaded PV arrays.

The soft switching multiphase boost converter acts as the maximum power point (MPP) tracker.

The proposed method has been simulated using MatLab with three-phase and four-phase soft switching boost converters.

The impact of increasing the number of phases in the converter topology has been analyzed by comparative simulation.

Increase in number of phases reduces the ripples at PV side and the soft switching methodology decreases the switching losses in the converter.

The four-phase soft switching converter interfaced with PV system has been validated experimentally and the results are presented.