Field programmable gate arrays control based photovoltaic energy management

Abstract

This paper presents hardware implementation of PV module for photovoltaic (PV) applications by using buck converter, battery, electronic card and FPGA Board. The goal of the project was to control the chopper in order to be able to charge a battery and feed a load with energy from that battery and/or the solar panel, and display all the significant signals. Therefore it was necessary to make a hardware card using current transducers and an algorithm implementation on an FPGA. The control algorithm and coding for integration with the PV cell is proposed by means of the VHDL code and implemented using Xilinx Spartan-3 from Digilent (NEXYS-2) FPGA Board. In this work, a hardware implementation of electronic card interface and open loop control with rotary encoder as a reference input in a PV system has been developed. This has all been done, and the whole project works, including the control of the chopper and displaying the values of the currents and voltages. It is better to control the chopper in closed loop instead of the open loop system that we used. This way it is possible to make sure that the solar panels works in its optimal power point, by using an MPPT. The Developed hardware has the merits of easy programming in VHDL with high accuracy even with low resolution ADC which are utilized in microcontroller and dSPACE. The proposed technique has been described through detailed experimental work.