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
External Project ID:NSC100-2221-E182-066
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 01/08/11 → 31/07/12 |
Keywords
- hardware sharing
- distributed MPPT
- time-domain ADC
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