PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SOLAR PANEL FED INTERLEAVED BUCK CONVERTER

Abstract

With the advent of technology and research in the field of renewable sources of energy, photovoltaic cells and their use in solar panels has increased in the past decade. Cost of energy has gone much lower than before and thus it is much more viable to setup solar modules to generate energy in remote areas. Also with advancements in the field of transistors, the size of microchips is reducing day by day. Thus power supplies with low voltage capacity and high current delivering capacity is required. Thus the concept of interleaving has been developed. This method suggests the connection of several converters in parallel to each other while being connected to a single voltage source as well as a single load. This will in turn increase the current bearing capacity of the converter unit as well as reduce the ripples in the output current, thereby reducing the losses incurred by the converter earlier. This dissertation report outlines the concept of two phase interleaved buck converter which operates with a duty cycle of less than 50%. It is different from conventional buck converters in a way that it has more current bearing capacity than the conventional one. Moreover the ripples in the output current are also reduced drastically. The report gives details about the design of inductors and filter capacitor used in the proposed converter. It also described the modeling of the converter using state space averaging technique. Finally the simulation results of the proposed converter have been shown by simulating it in MATLAB. Hardware prototype of the converter has been made in the laboratory and the results obtained have been shown briefly in the report.