Analysis and Development of SiC MOSFET Boost Converter as Solar PV Pre-regulator

TL;DR

This paper investigates a SiC MOSFET-based boost converter for solar PV pre-regulation, analyzing its characteristics, control, simulation, and experimental validation to improve efficiency and performance over traditional silicon devices.

Contribution

It presents a novel SiC MOSFET boost converter design for PV systems, including static/dynamic analysis, FPGA-based MPPT control, and experimental comparison with silicon converters.

Findings

SiC MOSFET exhibits superior high-temperature performance.

The proposed converter achieves reduced voltage ripple and losses.

Experimental results validate improved efficiency over silicon-based converters.

Abstract

Renewable energy source such as photovoltaic (PV) cell generates power from the sun light by converting solar power to electrical power with no moving parts and less maintenance. A single photovoltaic cell produces voltage of low level. In order to boost up the voltage, a DC-DC boost converter is used. In order to use this DC-DC converter for high voltage and high frequency applications, Silicon Carbide (SiC) device is most preferred because of larger current carrying capability, higher voltage blocking capability, high operating temperature and less static and dynamic losses than the traditional silicon (Si) power switches. In the proposed work, the static and dynamic characteristics of SiC MOSFET for different temperatures are observed. A SiC MOSFET based boost converter is investigated which is powered by PV source. This DC - DC converter is controlled using a Pulse-Width Method (PWM) and the duty cycle d is calculated for tracking the maximum power point using incremental conductance algorithm of the PV systems implemented in FPGA. Simulation studies are carried out in MATLAB/SIMULINK.A prototype of the SiC converter is built and the results are verified experimentally. The performance parameters of the proposed converter such as output voltage ripple input current ripple and losses are computed and it is compared with the classical silicon (Si) MOSFET converter.