International Conference on Current Trends in Computer, Electrical, Electronics and Communication (ICCTCEEC-2017)

Design of Standalone PV Charging System for Lead

Acid Battery using Controlled Boost Converter
Vaibhav A. Sansare, Nikhil N. Kasar Dr. Asha A. Gaikwad
ME Students, Department of Electrical Engineering, Asso. Prof., Department of Electrical Engineering,
G. H. Raisoni Institute of Engineering & Technology, G. H. Raisoni Institute of Engineering & Technology,
Wagholi, Pune. India Wagholi, Pune. India.
*vaisansare1234@gmail.com ashaatulgaikwad@gmail.com

Abstract- With the rapid growth of global energy demand of the form of energy that directly available from sun and
associated with society’s increasing awareness of environmental convert in to electrical energy, which is best form of energy
impacts from the widespread utilization of fossil fuels has led to without any climatic change and energy crisis. The most
the exploration of renewable energy sources. Photovoltaic (PV) important two advantages of solar power are that its fuel cost is
technology plays a vital role in such cases. Solar PV technology totally zero and it does not produce any greenhouse gases
being easily and freely available which is fabulous for various during generation of solar power. Another advantage of using
applications. Photovoltaic systems can be used to exploit the solar solar power for small power generation is its portability; we
energy in almost wide range of applications. Rapid technological can carry solar power generating device wherever small power
changes have led to power electronic products playing a crucial
generation is required. Over the most recent couple of years,
role in daily life. Energy storage equipments are commonly used
form of power electronic products. Thus a standalone PV system
the power conversion mechanisms for solar energy has been
with novel control is proposed for dc applications. Various significantly comes in compact size.
charging approaches give rise to various charging efficiencies and In a photovoltaic power supply system, batteries are used as
also indirectly influence the life of a battery charger. This paper an energy buffer. Lead acid battery is commonly used because
presents the design configuration with the least components to of its features such as wide operating temperature range, low
realize efficient standalone solar energy battery charger for self-discharge, long service life and easy maintenance. Proper
40Ah, 48V lead acid battery system with PWM based voltage controller for charging the battery is an inevitable necessity for
controlled boost converter with MATLAB. In PWM power
achieving high State of Charge (SOC) and longer battery life
converter we use the power MOSFET as a switching device and
operated in a switching on and switching off mode to control the
[2].
power MOSFET duty cycle to achieve the boost topology. PWM DC to DC converters are very popular electronic devices
power converters improves the low efficiency shortcoming of the used whenever to change the DC electrical power efficiently
traditionally adopted linear power converter with increasing from one voltage level to another voltage level. In general,
converter switching frequency. This paper also gives design of converter has several topologies such as boost converter, buck
standalone power supply and solar panel and the results are converter, buck–boost converter and multi-level converters.
presented using MATLAB Simulink.
The selection of the converter depends on the different
Keywords—Standalone PV changing system, Voltage controlled
applications that have been approached. There are five
boost converter, Lead acid battery charger. commonly used in DC-DC converter topologies which are
suitable for battery operated systems which are buck converter,
I. INTRODUCTION boost converter, non-inverting buck-boost converter, charge
pump converter and fly back converters [3]. So, here the boost
Decreasing fossil fuel resources and the adverse
topology has been introduced as a converter to convert the
environmental effects arising from converting these resources
voltage from the PV module to the battery.
into energy has caused a great need to consider
nonconventional energy sources as a technological option for In junction to control the charging process, the controller is
sustainable energy supply. Out of all nonconventional energy an important element to achieve desired process charging in
sources, photovoltaic (PV) energy is now becoming one of the term of time. There are many controllers that have been
fastest growing renewable energy technology due to developed such as proportional-integral-derivative (PID), fuzzy
continuous cost reduction and technological development as logic, P-resonant, neural network and others. However,
compared to other energy technologies. combine voltage and current controlled method for boost
converter using PWM method can achieve desired battery
Solar energy is easily available that has made it possible to
charging characteristics. The voltage control method controls
harvest it and utilize it properly. Solar energy can be used as
the battery charging voltage whereas the current control loop is
standalone producing system or can be a grid connected
a fast acting loop which achieve fast charging of lead acid
generating unit depending on the availability and access of a
battery. The entire project simulations and programing is
grid nearby. Thus it can be used to produce power in rural areas
carried out in MATLAB. MATLAB is a high performance
where the availability of grids is very low. Solar energy is one
language for technical computing. It integrates computation,

978-1-5386-3243-7/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

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International Conference on Current Trends in Computer, Electrical, Electronics and Communication (ICCTCEEC-2017)

visualization, and programming in an easy-to-use environment

where problems and solutions are expressed in mathematical
notation.

Solar Boost Battery

Panel Converter Bank

I Isolated power
Gate Driver PIC18 supply
circuit Microcontroller

V
Fig. 2 - Single-diode model of the theoretical PV cell and
Auxiliary supply (5V & 15V) equivalent circuit of a practical PV device including the series
and parallel resistances
Fig. 1 - Block diagram of proposed project
Fig. 1 shows block diagram of proposed project. Here bank of where, Ipv,n is the light generated current at the
batteries is charged using solar PV panel through controlled nominalcondition (STC), T and Tn are the actual and nominal
boost converter. The boost converter is used to increase voltage temperatures [K], G [W/m2] is the irradiation on the
level of input voltage from PV panel to charging voltage value. devicesurface, Gn is the nominal irradiation and KI is the short
The irradiance of solar panel is considered as variation factor circuitcurrent temperature coefficient at STC in A/K of the
on charging application. The PWM boost converter is PVmodule.
controlled using voltage mode controlling principle which The saturation current of diode Io and its dependence on the
controls the output voltage and current in order to achieve temperature may be expressed by:
control of battery charging. As proposed project is a standalone
charging system, therefore all auxiliary supplies required for   "#$ 1 1
  ,  ∗    3
various components and circuits is taken from isolated power    
supply which is designed to give constant 5V and 15V power
supply at 1ampere. where, Eg is the band gap energy of the semiconductor an ,
II. ANALYSIS OF PV MODULE CHARACTERISTICS is the nominal saturation current.
Photonix Solar PNX-220W mono-crystalline PV panels
Ideal solar cells work like a current source connected in manufactured by Photonix Electronics are used for comparing
parallel with a diode. This ideal model is represented with the model parameters for simulation. The PV module
resistors to indicate the losses and sometimes with additional specifications are given in Table I. MatLab model and
diodes that takes into account other phenomena. The Simulation results showing I-V and P-V characteristics of the
commonly used equivalent circuit of a solar cell/panel is shown
PV array are presented in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 respectively.
in Fig. 2, it includes a current source, one diode and two
resistors: one in series and one in parallel. Every element
included in the equivalent circuit indicates one parameter that
has to be determined. Equation 1 describes the single-diode
model of the practical PV device presented in Fig. 2. This
model offers a good compromise between simplicity and
accuracy and isused in the present work even though other
sophisticated models are available in literature [5].
   
        1   1
   

where Ipv is the photovoltaic current, Io is saturation currents

of the array and V is the thermal voltage of the array with Ns
cells connected in series. Rs is the equivalent series resistance
of the array and Rsh is the equivalent parallel resistance.
The light generated current of the photovoltaic module is
linearly depends upon the sun irradiation and is also affected
by the temperature according to the following equation:


  ,       2 Fig. 3 – MatLab Simulink model for Solar panel


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International Conference on Current Trends in Computer, Electrical, Electronics and Communication (ICCTCEEC-2017)

5V
Battery Half Bridge Half Wave 5V
Bank Inverter Rectifier 15 V
15 V

Multi winding
Transformer
Fig. 4 – I-V and P-V characteristics of Solar panel with Fig. 5 – Block diagram of isolated power supply
radiation 1kW/m2, 0.5kW/m2 and 0.1kW/m2 at T=250 The various designed parameters of the multi winding
transformer are given in Table II.
TABLE I. SPECIFICATION OF PHOTONIX PNX-220W The designed isolated power supply is simulated using
Power in watts (Pmax) 220 W MATLAB software. The Simulink model of isolated power
supply is as shown in Fig.6. Fig. 7 shows input and output
Open circuit voltage (Voc) 37.5 V voltage response of half-bridge inverter. The input to the half-
bridge inverter is 48 V DC supply which is the output of the
Short circuit current (Isc) 8.4 A
battery. The output of half bridge inverter is the square wave of
Voltage at maximum power (Vmp) 27 V 24V. In half-bridge inverter the duty cycle of both the IGBTs is
adjusted to 50%. The output of inverter is fed as a input voltage
Current at maximum power (Imp) 8.15 A to multi winding transformer. The output of multi-winding
Number of cells 54 transformer is pulsating DC square wave which is converted
into constant DC using capacitor filter. The output of isolated
power supply is as shown in Fig.8.
III. DESIGN AND SIMULATION OF ISOLATED POWER SUPPLY
The proposed charging system is standalone photo-voltaic TABLE II. PARAMETERS OF MULTI WINDING
system which is isolated from the utility grid. Therefore, all TRANSFORMER
required power supplies in the propose hardware should be Number of Primary winding 1
supplied through battery bank. Therefore, design of isolated
(standalone) power supply plays an important role in this Number of secondary windings 4
project. Fig. 5 shows block diagram of isolated power supply
with 5V and 15V DC outputs. Input supply is taken from the VA Rating of transformer 50 VA
battery bank which is 48V dc supply. This DC voltage is fed to Primary Voltage 24 V
a high frequency single phase half-bridge inverter.Inverter is
half-bridge voltage source inverter which is operating at very Secondary Voltage 5V & 15 V
high frequency i.e. at 100kHz, where two large blocking
Core- Toroidal core T-16
capacitors are required to provide a neutral point N, such that
each capacitor maintains a constant voltage (Vi /2). Because Number of primary turns 15
the current harmonics injected by the operation of the inverter
are low-order harmonics, a set of large capacitors is required. Number of Secondary turns for 5V 3.125≈4
Both switches S+ and S− of the half bridge inverter cannot be Number of Secondary turns for 15V 9.375≈10
ON simultaneously because a short circuit across the dc link
voltage source Vi would be produced. The output of the SWG For Primary winding 19
inverter is fed to a multi-winding step-down transformer. The
frequency chosen is very high, just to reduce the size of the SWG for Secondary winding 22
reactive component as transformer and capacitors used in the Primary winding resistance 0.00773Ω
circuit. The multi-winding transformer in the isolated supply
consists of 5 windings i.e. one winding in primary and four Total resistance of Secondary winding 0.0294Ω
windings in the secondary. At the each output a DC link
Magnetizing Inductance 0.336mH
capacitor is connected, and the obtained isolated DC supplies
can be fed as an auxiliary supply at different stages in
hardware.

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International Conference on Current Trends in Computer, Electrical, Electronics and Communication (ICCTCEEC-2017)

Fig. 6 – Simulink model of isolated power supply

IV. DC/ DC CONVERTER DESIGN AND CONTROL

A. Boost Converter
The basic DC/DC converter comprises a switch, a filter circuit
and load. In a boost converter or regulator output voltage of the
converter is greater than input voltage of the converter circuit
that means it boosting the input voltage that’s way its name is
“BOOST” regulator. Its output voltage VO is always greater
than the input voltage VI for steady-state operation. The boost
converter consists of an inductor L, a power MOSFET as a
switch, a diode D1, a filter capacitor C, and a load resistor RL.
The switching MOSFET is turned ON and turned OFF at the
switching frequency fs = 1/T with the ON duty ratio D = ton/T,
where ton is the time interval when the switch S is ON.
The boost converter can operate in either continuous or
Fig. 7 – Input and output voltage of Half bridge inverter discontinuous conduction mode, depending on the waveform of
the inductor current. The boost converter in DCM cannot
operate at RL =∞ because the filter capacitor has no path to
discharge. For proposed system the boost converter is designed
with DCM mode with following requirements and boundary
conditions. The switching frequency is designed as equal to
100 kHz for circuit miniaturization. The inductor value L,
required to operate the boost converter in discontinuous
conduction mode (DCM) is calculated by the following
equation:
+
&'()* ∗ - ∗ .(/
% 4
2 ∗ 04 ∗ 567()* 567()*  1

The designed parameters of the Boost converter in DCM

mode are given in Table III. The designed converter is
simulated in MatLab Simulink. Fig. 9 shows Simulink model
for open loop boost converter with resistive load. The response
for input voltage, output voltage, output current and gate
Fig. 8 – Output voltage waveform of isolated power supply voltage is shown in Fig. 10.

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International Conference on Current Trends in Computer, Electrical, Electronics and Communication (ICCTCEEC-2017)

TABLE III. PARAMETERS OF BOOST CONVERTER B. Control Topology of Boost converter

Input voltage range (24-36)V A dc-dc converter must provide a regulated dc output
voltage under varying load and input voltage conditions. The
Nominal output voltage 52V converter component values are also changing with time,
Maximum Battery charging current 20A temperature, pressure, and so forth. Hence, the control of the
output voltage should be performed in a closed loop manner
Switching frequency 100 kHz using principles of negative feedback. The commonly used
Inductor 3μH, 30A closed-loop control methods for PWM dc-dc converters are
the voltage-mode control and the current-mode control. In the
Capacitor 75μF,100V voltage-mode control scheme shown in Fig.11, the output
voltage of converter is sensed and subtracted from an external
NTB52N10,
Switching MOSFET reference voltage in an error amplifier. The error amplifier
52A,100V generates a control voltage which is compared to a constant-
amplitude saw tooth waveform. The comparator produces a
PWM signal that is fed to driver circuit of controllable
switches in the dc-dc converter with the PI controller. The
duty ratio of the PWM signal depends on the value of the
control voltage. The frequency of the PWM signal is the same
as the frequency of the saw-tooth waveform. An important
advantage of the voltage-mode control is simplicity in
hardware implementation and flexibility. The error amplifier
in Fig.11 reacts fast to any changes in the converter output
voltage. Thus, the voltage-mode control provides good load
regulation, that is, regulation against variations in the load.
The proposed DC-DC converter with voltage mode control
technique for battery charging application is modeled in
MatLab Simulink. The simulation model for entire scheme is
shown in Fig. 13. The voltage across battery terminal during
charging state is shown in Fig. 14. The PWM signal output
which is fed to driver of MOSFET is shown in Fig. 12.

Fig. 9 – Simulink model of open loop Boost Converter

Fig. 11 – Voltage mode controlled boost converter

Fig. 10 – simulation response for open loop PWM boost Fig. 12 – PWM Signal which controls switching of MOSFET
converter

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International Conference on Current Trends in Computer, Electrical, Electronics and Communication (ICCTCEEC-2017)

Fig. 13 – MatLab Simulink model for charging of Battery using Voltage controlled Boost converter

scheme,the charging voltage of the battery is to be controlled

using the voltage mode control principle of boost converter to
achieve charging of battery when SOC is greater than 80%. As
the proposed PV charging system is standalone system
therefore complete design of standalone isolated power supply
is completed which provides supply to the various components
and circuits.
REFERENCES
[1] Ragasudha C. P, Dawnee S. “Design and Implementation of standalone
Photovoltaic charging system,” 2012 IEEE International Conference on
Power Electronics, Drives and Energy SystemsDecember16-19, 2012,
Bengaluru, India
[2] Chiang, S.J. Shieh, H.J. Chen, M.C, “Modeling and Control of PV
Charger System with SEPIC Converter”, IEEE Transactions on
Industrial Electronics, Vol.56, no.11, Nov 2009.
[3] L. Zhao, J. Qian, and T. Instruments, “DC-DC Power Conversions and
Fig. 14 – Voltage across battery terminals System Design Considerations for Battery Operated System.”
[4] G.C. Hsieh, S.W. Chen, and C .Y. Tsai, “Interleaved Smart Burp PV
The proposed scheme of battery charging is efficient when Charger for Lead Acid Batteries with Incremental Conductance
SOC is greater than 80%. If SOC is less than 80% then battery MPPT,” in Proc. IEEE ECCE, Phoenix, pp. 3248-3255, 2011.
charge in constant current mode. To achieve constant current [5] H.L.Tsai, C.S.Tu, Y.J.Su, “Development of Generalized Photovoltaic
charging of battery, current controlled technique of boost Model Using MATLAB/SIMULINK”, WCECS, October 2008
converter can be applicable. In charging system of lead acid [6] T.Esram, P.L.Chapman, “Comparison of Photovoltaic Array
battery combine voltage and current control techniques can be MaximumPower Point Tracking Techniques”, IEEE Transactions on
Energy Conversion, Vol.22, N0.2, June 2007.
used to achieve smart charging of battery.
[7] N.Mohan, T.M Undeland, and W.P. "Robbins, “Power
Electronics:Converters, Application and Design”, 3rd Edition, John
V. CONCLUSION Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2007.
In this proposed project a comprehensive study of [8] MARIAN K. KAZIMIERCZUK“Pulse-width Modulated DC–DC
standalone PV charging system for lead acid battery has made Power Converters” 1st Edition A John Wiley and Sons, Ltd,
using controlled boost converter. The Photonix PNX-220W Publication.
solar panel has selected and the IV and PV characteristic of [9] A NPTEL course on “Switched Mode Power Supply” Prof. N.
panel has obtained by MATLAB simulation. The response Ramnarayanan and L. Umanand, IISC Banglore.
obtained for the open circuit voltage and short circuit current
for solar panel are matching with parameters of panel.
In this project study boost converter is used as DC-DC
converter to increase voltage level from solar panel to required
charging voltage. The proposed scheme is similar way as
MPPT charging technique where the maximum possible output
is obtained by various MPPT algorithm. In proposed

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