Design, Construction, and Testing of Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) Charge Controller for Photovoltaic (PV) Power Generation

Abstract

Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) charge controller is designed for using an easy and effective way to charge a 12v battery and a laptop charger of 19v simultaneously through the principle of the bulk-boost converter. This research work is suitable for 150W solar panels, as the Maximum Power Point (MPP) of Photovoltaic (PV) power generation systems changes with variation in atmospheric conduction, an important consideration in the research work is the efficience of PV systems to track the Maximum Power Point (MPP) correctly. It enhances battery life by providing higher efficiency to it. The efficiency of the research work was calculated from the power dissipated, and also calculated the point at which the battery extracts maximum power from the PV module. As the work was tested, the voltage and current were obtained which was used to plot the voltage-current and voltage-power characteristics curve. Though a lot of works have been published on this topic, but none has researched on MPPT that can charge both 12v battery and 19v laptop charger simultaneously. Hence, this work is aimed at researching on Maximum Power Point Tracker (MPPT) that will be able to perform the above mentioned features. Also, it is the objective of this work to compare the theoretical and experimental relationship between MPPT and PWM charge controller which the efficiency of the MPPT was calculated theoretically to be 97% while, experimentally we obtained it as 91.1% while for PWM the efficiency was calculated theoretically as 75% and experimentally as 70.4% which shows that MPPT charge controller is approximately 30% efficient more than the PWM charge controller.