A high gain cascaded boost converter with reduced voltage stress for PV application

Abstract

This Paper proposes a high voltage gain dc-dc lift-up converter for photovoltaic based power generation especially used for microgrid applications. Proposed converter has two stage boosting with effective overall gain in form of quadratic-quadrupler boost (QQB) factor. The converter achieves high voltage gain with low duty ratio operation which is necessary for efficient operation of boost converter. Here, a lower value of winding turns ratio in coupled inductor was selected to reduce leakage inductance and voltage stress across switching devices. To analyze the converter operation, simulation was carried out using PSIM software and results were validated using experiments conducted on a 200 W hardware prototype developed in laboratory. A boost factor of 10.5 is achieved at a turn’s ratio of 1.9 and about 35% of duty cycle. Maximum efficiency of ∼92.9% is achieved for the proposed converter at 175 W output power operation for 40 V input voltage.