An efficient switched inductor–capacitor‐based novel non‐isolated high gain SEPIC for solar energy applications

Abstract

The solar photovoltaic (PV) sources have low voltage output and hence cannot be used directly in micro‐grid applications. Therefore, to boost the low voltage output, a novel high gain single‐ended primary inductor converter (SEPIC) is proposed in this manuscript. The proposed high gain SEPIC (HGS) has an advantage of obtaining high voltage gain at a low duty ratio and continuous input current, which makes it viable for PV applications. The proposed converter offers simple control, and the high gain is obtained without the use of any transformer or coupled inductor so the semiconductor switch will not experience a voltage overshoot during the turn‐off operation. Hence, the conduction losses of the converter switch are reduced, and the performance of the converter is enhanced. Additionally, this manuscript also investigates the effectiveness of the proposed HGS in integration with the PV array. An extensive performance evaluation of the proposed HGS is investigated and compared with different SEPIC topologies in irradiance change conditions. Experimental implementation of the proposed HGS confirms the theoretical analysis and verifies the performance. Also, the real time (RT) analysis of the proposed HGS with PV array is conducted to show the validation of high gain operation for the PV application.