A Novel Controller for Multiple Ladder Cuk Converters for Balancing Photovoltaic Modules

CHIACCHIARINI HÉCTOR GERARDO; JONATAN CECI; OLIVA ALEJANDRO; MANDOLESI PABLO

Córdoba

Congreso; XVI Reunión de Trabajo en Procesamiento de la Información y Control; 2015

UTN y UNC

Partial shading is undeniably one of the most severe problems in photovoltaic power harvesting at residential locations. Hardware architectures have proven to be valuable, since they can virtually eliminate the power loss induced by partial shading.Actually, it depends on the architecture?s granularity level.Working at cell level will result in a photovoltaic module that does not suffer from partial shading. However, the controller complexity and computational effort grows rapidly as the number of series cells in creases. This work proposes a simple alternative to reduce the order of the control strategy while still main-taining total control of the system operating point. A two-level strategy based on discrete controllers is actually used to drive the entire system (composed of 12 cells) to its global maximum power point (MPP). The performance of the developed controller is tested through simulations that show promising results.