2017 Volume 14 Issue 3 Pages 20161202
This paper proposes a new switching power circuit topology combining a boost converter and a forward one by integrating the inductor. The target application of the proposed scheme is a photovoltaic (PV) power conditioning system which operates according to the differential power processing architecture. The boost converter delivers the main PV string power to the DC-link, and the forward converter handles a portion of the boost inductor’s energy to compensate the power difference among the PV panels. Not only the compensation, but also operates the forward converter the distributed maximum power point tracking (DMPPT) control for each PV panel. Since the input of the forward comes through the transformer coupled with the boost converter’s inductor instead of the high voltage DC-link, this converter requires no extremely step-down voltage conversion ratios, which give several benefits such as low device stresses and high conversion efficiency. In the paper, analysis and design procedures are presented and a 200-W hardware is implemented to validate the performance of the proposed topology such as the efficiency and DMPPT control.
