All ETDs from UAB

Advisory Committee Chair

Mohammad Haider

Advisory Committee Members

Karthik Lingasubramanian

Dalton S Nelson

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

2017

Degree Name by School

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) School of Engineering

Abstract

The energy from solar panels can be improved to extract more power by using DC-DC converters operating in continuous mode. DC-DC converters which generate fixed DC voltage were selected to observe the photovoltaic operation at maximum power point (MPP). In this thesis, a boost converter and a buck converter are cascaded to step-up then step down voltage from a photovoltaic (PV) array with changeable voltage, irradiance, and temperature, to a 24 V DC. The filtering parameters of the converter were computed and the means which is used as a switch is a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) with a switching frequency of 10 KHz. However, the I-V (current-voltage) characteristic of the PV array is affected by irradiation and temperature, which have a nonlinear relationship. Therefore, the duty cycle needs to be calculated and changed to turn the converter to the maximum power available. The change in irradiation and temperature give different MPP at various curves. The algorithm of the MPP tracking (MPPT) operation was achieved by using the Incremental Conductance (IC) method to provide high tracking accuracy and faster response. The entire system has been designed using MATLAB Simulink Program and simulation results are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

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Engineering Commons

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