Modeling of Photovoltaic MPPT Lead Acid Battery Charge Controller for Standalone System Applications

Abstract

This paper presents the circuitry modeling of the solar photovoltaic MPPT lead-acid battery charge controller for the standalone system in MATLAB/Simulink environment. A buck topology is utilized as a DC-DC converter for the charge controller implementation. The maximum power of the photovoltaic panel is tracked by the Perturb and Observe MPPT algorithm. The battery charge controller charges the lead-acid battery using a three-stage charging strategy. The three charging stages include the MPPT bulk charge, constant voltage absorption charge, and float charge stage. The performance analysis of the model is carried out in the following aspects, there are MPPT tracking performance, battery charging performance and overall charge controller efficiency performance are benchmarked with commercial MPPT charge controller for validation. The performance result shows that the MPPT is capable to track to the PV panel maximum point at any solar irradiance variation within 0.5 seconds with maximum power tracking efficiency up to 99.9 %. The three-stage charging strategy also successfully demonstrated. The overall charge controller average efficiency achieved up to 98.3 % which matches many high end commercial solar PV MPPT charge controller product specifications. This validated model contributes to a better sizing of PV panel and battery energy storage for the small and medium standalone PV system.