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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
NORWAY. (e-mail: norum@ntnu.no). charging current is still flowing through the battery when the
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
1295
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
lower temperatures. Thus the battery life suffers as the
battery charge voltage does not reduce as the temperature
goes up. IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
While it is not intended that some kind of MPPT [2] The proposed charger circuit model is shown in Fig. 2a. The
scheme be used for these low cost stand alone systems, at solar panel is connected to the battery through N-channel
the same time any other low cost solution to mitigate some MOSFET Q1, driven by an error amplifier that is powered
of the above issues will be very helpful.
Q1 R4 R7
R1 U1
Vin BATTERY
V SENSE
Vcc
ADC0
BATTERY TO LOAD
VOLTAGE 2Vin TEMP SENSE
NTC1
R3 uC
PV DOUBLER ERROR REF PWM
ADC1
BATTERY CHARGING
AMPLIFIER P0 CURRENT SENSE
BATTERY ADC2
CHARGED
1296
[2] microcontroller also senses
T. F. Wu, C. H. Chang, and Y. J.the
Wu,battery voltageconverters
Single-stage throughfor PV The microcontroller continuously monitors the battery
lightingand
R4/R5 systems with MPPT
the battery and energy
charging backup,
current throughin IEEE
R6, Trans.
to On voltage and for the condition when the battery voltage is less
Aerospace
provide and Electron.
various Sys, Vol. 35,
annunciations No. 4, pp. 13061317,
by LED1/LED2. KeepingOct.in than 12.5 V, it sets the PWM duty cycle to 100%. This sets
1999.
mind the end application cost factors, effort is made to make the error amplifiers reference voltage to the highest level,
S. Duryea, S. Islam, W. Lawrance, A battery management system for
[3] the whole circuit implementation as simple as possible. which in turn on Q1 fully. Once the battery voltage charges
stand-alone photovoltaic energy systems, IEEE Industry Applications
Compared to the
Magazine, Vol. original
7, Issue: simple
3, pp. charging circuit, the only
67-72, 1999 beyond 12.5 V, the microcontroller senses the ambient
addition
M. Bhatt,isW.G.
the Hurley,
microcontroller
W.H. Wolfe, and
Aanewcouple of sensing
approach to intermittent temperature and sets a reduced duty cycle. The duty cycle is
[4] circuits.
charging It
of can
valveberegulated
shown lead
(though it is not in
acid batteries thestandby
focus of this set by reading from a look-up table and the duty cycle is set
applications,
paper) that theIEEE
costTrans. on addition
of this Industrial can
Electronics,
be moreVol. 52, 5, 2005
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.
To develop a better understanding about the proposed
charging scheme, measurements were made on a 5 A
prototype charge controller. The oscillogram shown in Fig. 4
Fig. 2b shows the charging voltage and charging current shows the various signals in the charge control circuit. Here
pattern of the above proposed scheme. It can be seen that the Channel 1 shows the PWM signal and Channel 2 shows the
battery charging current is not interrupted and the battery is REF signal. As explained earlier, the Channel 2 value is the
float charged with gradually decreasing charging current averaged version of Channel 1 pulses. Based on the sensed
resulting in the battery being almost fully charged. Further temperature, the duty cycle of Channel 1 is modulated and
the battery float voltage is adjusted according to the ambient hence the Channel 2 voltage will move up or down. Channel
temperature. This results in complete charging of the battery 3 shows the charging voltage set by Q1 (13.64 V) -
resulting in optimum battery sizing and increased battery life indicating that it is operating in the linear region.
that reduces overall system costs indirectly.
The microcontroller-charging algorithm is shown in the
flow chart shown in Fig. 3. Various set and measured
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
[1] R. J. Wai, W. H. Wang, and C. Y. Lin, High-performance stand-
alone photovoltaic generation system, in IEEE Trans. on Ind.
Electron., Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 240250, Jan. 2008.
12981297