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between the solar cells, battery and the LED light can take
many forms, but for cost sensitive rural applications, it is
Fig. 1a A commonly used charging converter circuit model
important to achieve longest battery life and always charge
the battery to its maximum capacity with the simplest
possible charging circuit. In most charging circuits, the
charging of the battery during daylight hours is controlled
by a simple switch, which stays on as long as the battery
voltage is below a preset voltage. This level of simplicity [1]
is dictated by the cost factor and also by the thinking that the
end user is not sophisticated enough to deal with higher
complexity and any possible tuning/control knobs. The size
of the solar panel, the battery and the LED itself are matched
to ensure that the storage and delivery capacity do not overly
exceed or fall short of the load requirements.
Manuscript received July 15, 2008. Fig. 1b. Various operation stages of a commonly used charging
Supratim Basu is Managing Director of Bose Research Pvt. Ltd., converter circuit model.
Bangalore. INDIA. (phone: +91 80 23419658 / 23419278; e-mail:
boseresearch@ vsnl.net). Fig. 1b shows the charging voltage and charging current
Lars Norum is a Professor with the Electrical Power Engineering pattern of the above scheme. It can be seen that a significant
Department, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim charging current is still flowing through the battery when the
NORWAY. (e-mail: norum@ntnu.no).
Dhaval Dalal, was Technical Director at ON Semiconductors, USA. He
charging process is terminated due to the battery reaching
is now with ACP Technologies, Bangalore, INDIA. (e-mail: the pre-set cut-off voltage. Thus the charging of the battery
dhaval@acptek.com). is incomplete as the charging is stopped before the battery is
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978-1-4244-1888-6/08/$25.00
c 2008 IEEE
fully charged. This results in incomplete charging of the change with temperature and thus reducing the charging
battery resulting over sizing of the battery that increases voltage as the temperature goes up is very useful. Thus by
overall system costs indirectly. using a voltage regulating circuit between the solar panel
Further as the battery float voltage is temperature and the battery, temperature compensation can be easily
dependent, in remote rural applications where the ambient achieved by adjusting the regulating circuits output voltage
temperature variations can be large, the above charging in proportion to the ambient temperature. Thus the battery
scheme can often overcharge of the battery at higher charging voltage can be made dependent on the ambient
temperatures and undercharge the battery at lower temperature resulting in increased battery capacity and life.
temperatures. If the cut-off voltage at which the charging In practice, the charging float voltage is reduced as the
process is terminated is set low enough so that the battery ambient temperature increases.
does not overcharge at the highest temperature, the total
charging capacity of the battery will significantly reduce at IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
lower temperatures. Thus the battery life suffers as the The proposed charger circuit model is shown in Fig. 2a. The
battery charge voltage does not reduce as the temperature solar panel is connected to the battery through N-channel
goes up. MOSFET Q1, driven by an error amplifier that is powered
While it is not intended that some kind of MPPT [2]
scheme be used for these low cost stand alone systems, at
Q1 R4 R7
the same time any other low cost solution to mitigate some Vin
R1 U1
Vcc
BATTERY
V SENSE
TO LOAD
BATTERY
NTC1
VOLTAGE 2Vin R3
TEMP SENSE
III. R2
C1 P1
GND
P2 CHARGING
R5
R6
CHARGING AND BATTERY LIFE LED1 LED2
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microcontroller also senses the battery voltage through The microcontroller continuously monitors the battery
R4/R5 and the battery charging current through R6, to voltage and for the condition when the battery voltage is less
provide various annunciations by LED1/LED2. Keeping in than 12.5 V, it sets the PWM duty cycle to 100%. This sets
mind the end application cost factors, effort is made to make the error amplifiers reference voltage to the highest level,
the whole circuit implementation as simple as possible. which in turn on Q1 fully. Once the battery voltage charges
Compared to the original simple charging circuit, the only beyond 12.5 V, the microcontroller senses the ambient
addition is the microcontroller and a couple of sensing temperature and sets a reduced duty cycle. The duty cycle is
circuits. It can be shown (though it is not the focus of this set by reading from a look-up table and the duty cycle is set
paper) that the cost of this addition can be more than in a way that the duty cycle reduces with increasing
compensated by supporting the load for longer hours or temperature. The microcontroller also senses the battery
reducing the battery nominal capacity as may be desired. charging current through R6, to provide various charging
status annunciations with LEDs.
Fig. 2b shows the charging voltage and charging current To develop a better understanding about the proposed
pattern of the above proposed scheme. It can be seen that the charging scheme, measurements were made on a 5 A
battery charging current is not interrupted and the battery is prototype charge controller. The oscillogram shown in Fig. 4
float charged with gradually decreasing charging current shows the various signals in the charge control circuit. Here
resulting in the battery being almost fully charged. Further Channel 1 shows the PWM signal and Channel 2 shows the
the battery float voltage is adjusted according to the ambient REF signal. As explained earlier, the Channel 2 value is the
temperature. This results in complete charging of the battery averaged version of Channel 1 pulses. Based on the sensed
resulting in optimum battery sizing and increased battery life temperature, the duty cycle of Channel 1 is modulated and
that reduces overall system costs indirectly. hence the Channel 2 voltage will move up or down. Channel
The microcontroller-charging algorithm is shown in the 3 shows the charging voltage set by Q1 (13.64 V) -
flow chart shown in Fig. 3. Various set and measured indicating that it is operating in the linear region.
parameters given in the flow chart refer to the charger circuit
given in Fig. 2a.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper has aimed to debunk the myth that the lower
cost applications cannot use better available technology. The
fact that technologies such as PV solar and LED lamps have
higher initial costs, sophisticated control solutions that
extend the life, efficiency and availability of these systems
to the end user are necessary. In this paper, a simple yet
novel modification to the charging circuit for the battery of a
stand alone PV system is described along with an
implementation flow chart/algorithm. Results are described
to show the effectiveness of this algorithm, compared to the
traditional implementation.
REFERENCES
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