Research and design of low-power grid-connected PV power generation system based on automatic solar tracking

Abstract

A low-power grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) power generation system based on automatic solar tracking is designed in this paper. In order to increase the level of accuracy of automatic solar tracking, the part of automatic solar tracking adopts the method of hybrid tracking and uses pin-cushion two-dimensional position sensitive detector plus four silicon PV cells as the photosensitive element. An adaptive topological structure of the main circuit based on a cascaded Boost converter circuit and the H6-type inverter topology are designed for the system to obtain a better working condition. Then an MPPT algorithm combined modified constant voltage algorithm with modified variable step-size increment conductance algorithm is proposed in order to improve the efficiency of PV power generation. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the control system. Finally, the hardware and software of the system are also designed. Moreover, a graphic interface made with the LabVIEW software allows the user to monitor and save the data in a file.

Keywords

• Automatic solar tracking
• pin-cushion PSD
• PV grid-connected
• H6-type inverter topology
• MPPT
• human–computer interaction