A high efficiency photovoltaic module integrated converter with the asymmetrical half-bridge flyback converter

A module integrated converter (MIC) for a photovoltaic (PV) cell is important part of power conditioning system (PCS). It performs maximum power point tracking of a PV cell to generate the power as much as possible from solar energy. There are several methods for connection between the PV modules and the MICs. In order to avoid partial shading effects, converter-per-module approach was proposed. The MIC that performs maximum power point tracking (MPPT), if it is low efficiency, is no use. The MIC whose output is connected to the output of PV module was proposed for high efficiency. However, there are some problems. In this study, an asymmetrical half-bridge flyback converter is proposed instead of the original flyback converter with same method to solve the problems. The proposed MIC was built to verify the performance. The new topology using soft switching technique showed good performance for the efficiency. At the higher power, the efficiency of the proposed converter is higher than existing converter. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.