Peak power tracking for a solar buck charger

This thesis discusses the design, implementation, and testing of a buck converter with peak power tracking. The peak power tracker uses a perturb and observe algorithm to actively track the solar panel's peak power point and a global sweep algorithm accounts for startup and multiple local maxima. The tracker takes the place of the current mode loop in the converter's control scheme by providing a battery with peak charging current. A voltage mode loop is also designed to take over control from the tracker to complete the multi-loop structure. A solar panel simulator is designed to mimic the characteristics of an actual solar panel to allow careful testing of the tracking algorithms. A test circuit board is built and its operation is verified. Finally, the power extracting potential of the active tracking method from this thesis is compared to two simpler solar regulators.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Cohen, Jeremy Michael, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jay Celani and David J. Perreault.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61153

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/61153