Design of Auxiliary Resonant Boost Converter for Flywheel based Photovoltaic Fed Microgrid

Background/Objectives: To have a sustainable and low carbon living, efficient use of renewable energy is necessary hence, a power converter with less switching loss is proposed for the improvement of efficiency of proposed system. Methods/Statistical Analysis: In this work a dc boost converter is considered using an auxiliary resonant circuit for implementation of soft switching technology to reduce switching loss in the converter. The proposed dc resonant boost converter is designed for a required dc output based on the gate duty cycle. The soft switching is made possible by suitably designing the values of the inductor and capacitor of the dc resonant circuit. This circuit is simulated with MATLAB software. Findings: The resonant dc boost converter was simulated using MATLAB software with hard switching, the results of the simulation is discussed with waveforms and numerical values. The soft switched converter was able to provide an improved output voltage of 2Volts, current of 0.4 A, compared to the conventionally designed converter. Suitable design of the resonant components namely the inductor and capacitor, the efficiency of the soft-switched resonant boost converter improved by 2% compared to hard switched converter. Both the hard switching and soft-switched converters were simulated in open loop. It is evident from the output voltage and current waveforms, the settling time taken by the soft-switched converter is more compared to hard switched converter, but the improvement in voltage profile, current profile and efficiency overcomes the drawback of increased settling time. The resonant soft-switched converter when compared with the other converters reported provides an improved performance hence very much suitable for solar photovoltaic application. Applications/Improvements: The performance of the soft-switched converter can be improved further through closed loop control with simple controllers or using fuzzy logic controllers. This converter can also be used for other sources in any distributed generation.