Implementation of Smart Battery Charger with Low Power Photo-Voltaic Energy System Using Synchronous Buck Converter

This paper presents the use of photo-voltaic (PV) battery charger with synchronous buck converter in the charging test of a lithium-ion battery to demonstrate the effectiveness of the study. The proposed synchronous buck converter topology uses soft switching technique to reduce the switching loss which is found most prominently in the conventional dc–dc buck converter, thus efficiency of the system is improved. Under the same operating conditions, the proposed battery charger with synchronous buck converter indeed reduces the temperature of the switch, thus reducing switching losses and the MOSFETs switches have a longer life span. The circuit efficiency of the overall charging process exceeds 95% and greatly exceeds the 84% efficiency of traditional PWM dc–dc buck converters. The DC power extracted from the PV array is modulated and regulated by the converter to meet the load requirements. Further, the comparative study is made between the proposed synchronous buck converter and the conventional buck converter in terms of converter efficiency and switching loss reduction. The studied system is modeled and simulated in the MATLAB-Simulink environment and the practical implementation of the proposed converter is done to validate the theoretical results.