Design and Implementation of Hardware Shared Distributed Maximum Power Point Tracking Chip for Intelligent Renewable Energy Systems

Project: National Science and Technology CouncilNational Science and Technology Council Academic Grants

Project Details

Abstract

In this proposal, we expect to develop and implement the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) circuit incorporated with Analog-to-Digital Conversion (ADC) circuit to enhance conversion efficiency of photovoltaic system. The power conversion efficiency in photovoltaic system can easily affected by the weather. Even if the MPPT chip in the idea case can reach 95% of energy conversion efficiency, but as long as affected by environmental factors, solar power generation efficiency of the system will degrade greatly. Among them, the solar panel shadowing is the greatest impact on power conversion efficiency, as long as the shadow affect 10% of solar panel area will produce about 40% of the energy loss. Therefore, in this proposal, we will develop the distributed MPPT technique to deal with the mismatching issues resulting from the shadow. With the power optimization module in each solar cell, regardless of whether the solar panel is affected by the shadow or not, we can still achieve the maximum power conversion efficiency. In this way, the system voltage/current mismatch issues can be solved and the overall energy conversion efficiency can be significantly enhanced. Through hardware sharing and timing reordering, N MPPT/ADC chips can be merged into one MPPT/ADC chip. In this way, we can provide the MPPT control signals to the distributed DC/DC converters in a more hardware-efficient way. The MPPT algorithm in this project is designed based on the step-adaptive incremental conductance method [5], which operates together with power optimization module to control DC/DC converters to solve the solar panel shadowing issues and solar cell mismatching issues. ADC is designed by time-domain because of its advantages in low frequency operation, simple structure, no OP circuit, a high tolerance for process variation, and portability in advanced technology process. Furthermore, in order to improve the ADC conversion resolution, we propose a voltage-to-time converter with self-calibration function incorporated with time-to-digital converter to extend the resolution in ADC, which can replace the conventional ADC.

Project IDs

Project ID:PB10007-7274
External Project ID:NSC100-2221-E182-066
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date01/08/1131/07/12

Keywords

  • hardware sharing
  • distributed MPPT
  • time-domain ADC

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