Photovoltaic Water Pumping System Using Maximum Power Point Tracking

Abstract

Water resources are essential for satisfying daily human needs varying, from agriculture to energy production. As a tropical country Bangladesh receives a substantial amount of solar insolation suitable for PV application. Being an agricultural economy, the irrigation need is increasing day by day. Use of diesel run pumping system is neither cost effective nor environment friendly. Among the various form of renewable energy technologies Solar photovoltaic technology is perhaps the most used one to generate electricity especially in the rural area of all over the world. The purpose of this research is to analyze the potentiality and cost effectiveness of using solar irrigation system in Bangladesh and also to harness maximum power from the solar panel. The work presented in this thesis present the design and the simulation of a centrifugal pump coupled to a photovoltaic PV generation via a maximum power point tracker MPPT controller. Maximum power point trackers (MPPTs) play a vital role in photovoltaic (PV) systems because they increase the efficiency of the solar photovoltaic system by increasing the power output. The paper presents an Open voltage (OV) scheme for extracting the maximum power from a PV system for use in a water pumping system. A new topology of buck converter is used with feedback PI controller which adjusts the duty cycle of buck converter to match the load impedance to the PV panel, consequently maximizes the motor speed and water discharge rate of the centrifugal pump. The performance of the OV method is evaluated and modeled in SIMULINK environment of MATLAB to confirm the significance of its power improvement and efficient technique for water pumping system.