Performance evaluation of single switch high frequency resonant power converter for alternative energy sources

This paper investigates the performance evaluation of single switch high frequency resonant power converter for solar energy applications. The proposed resonant power converter integrates a single-switch with Zero-Voltage Switching (ZVS) and Zero-Current Switching (ZCS) by an energy-blocking diode. The converter enhances the energy conversion efficiency with less switching losses using single ended structure by achieving soft switching technique. The converter has been demonstrated under different operating modes with an equivalent circuit. Moreover, this converter is conveniently interfaced with Photo-Voltaic (PV) system for promoting the green energy. The sun radiates more photons which is more sufficient to meet the energy demand. But, solar energy has certain intermittency issues, not shining at night and also during daytime there may be cloudy or rainy weather and partial shadow effects which affects the performance of the system. But, due to this Partial Shading Conditions (PSC) there are multiple peaks and multiple steps in the Power-Voltage (P-V) & Current-Voltage (I-V) characteristics curve respectively. One way to enhance the systems performance is by operating the PV system at its Maximum Power Point (MPP). This can be achieved by incorporating a suitable MPPT control algorithm along with the converter circuit. Here, the Incremental Conductance (I&C) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms have been developed and simulated under Matlab-simulink environment to track the Global Maximum Power Point (GMPP). The main issue in the Incremental Conductance is, struck with the Local Maximum Point (LMP) and it fails to track the GMPP. The simulated results show that the evolutionary technique based PSO MPPT overcomes the drawbacks of I&C algorithm where it tracks the GMPP effectively. The parameters of the PV module have been obtained from the manufacturer datasheet (MS24250) for these analyses.