Power electronic interface has reached a new level in the area of hybrid energy integration nowadays. The existence for the concept of hybrid energy integration is truly questionable without a proper power electronic interface. In this paper, a modified dual input DC-DC converter which is capable of incorporating two distinct V-I characteristic sources such as solar-PV, battery, fuel cell, etc., is proposed. The converter has the ability to operate in both unidirectional and bidirectional mode with buck, buck-boost and boost operation. The software simulation of the proposed converter has been conducted in MATLAB/Simulink platform in a detailed manner and an experimental prototype of the propsed converter has been built to validate the simulation results.
Keyword:Distinct energy sources Hybrid energy sytem Modifeid dual input DC-DC converter Multi input DC-DC converter Power electronic interface
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Corresponding Author:Sivaprasad Athikkal, Department of Electrical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Calicut, Kerala, India-673601. Email: sivanuday@gmail.com
INTRODUCTIONThe electricity demand is drastically increasing as a result of massive increase in the population and industrial growth. Conventional energy generation based on fossil fuels and other sources are excessively used to satisfy the increasing power demand. But in the current scenario of electric power generation, the rapid depletion of fossil fuel and the critical environmental issues due to the usage of these conventional energy sources made the researchers to think about the alternatives. Hence the practice of using the nonconevntional energy sources such as solar-PV, wind and storages like the battery, fuel cell and ultra-capacitor are started since they are clean and non-polluting in nature. But the stand-alone usees of these energy sources particularly solar-PV and wind is not preferable due to their highly intermittent nature. Hence the idea of Hybrid Energy System (HES) is developed to overcome these issues.The HES is an advanced technology which is proficient in meeting the widely changing rural electricity requirements by the proper incorporation of non-conventional energy sources with same or distinct voltage-current (V-I) characteristics [1]. The powerful realization of the concept of hybrid energy integration is incomplete without a suitable power electronic interface [2]. To accommodate multiple number of energy sources, parallel connected single input DC-DC converters are widely used in the conventional scheme. But high cost, large system complexity and lower efficiency are the major demerits of this method. To cancel out these drawbacks, the notion of multiple input DC-DC converter (MDCs) is developed. Comparatively lower component count, higher efficiency, simple and compact structure are the potential advantages of MDCs. Different MDCs are already reported in the literature [3]- [7]. Most of the MDC topologies are integrating various in...