Dual Input Dual Output Converter for Renewable Energy Applications

With the increasing fossil fuel exhaustion, environmental pollution and global energy demand, the use of renewable energy based clean and non-pollutant energy sources are gaining more importance. Since these sources are highly intermittent in nature, power electronic interfaces are necessary for their efficient utilization. For stand-alone applications, energy storage devices are required for backup and fast dynamic response.Existing converters for such applications use a common dc-link, which employ multiple converters. A single stage dual input dual output DC-DC converter with energy storage system for standalone applications is proposed in this paper. The first input of the converter is from photovoltaic (PV) cells and the second input is a rechargeable battery. The work is intended to minimize the complexity of the converter during the integration of rechargeable battery to Solar PV systems. The existing converter is modified to provide a regulated output voltage and to clamp the PV cells’ voltage to the maximum power point value to maximize efficiency. When the PV cells harvest more power than the load demand, the surplus energy is used to charge the rechargeable battery. When the PV cells cannot harvest sufficient power, the converter schedules the PV cells and the batterytogetherto power the load . The proposed converter has been modelled and simulated using Simulink in the MATLAB. The simulation results proved that the proposed converter works satisfactorily where the load voltage is regulated in all power flow.