Direct Usage of Photovoltaic Solar Panels to Supply a Freezer Motor with Variable DC Input Voltage

Abstract

In this paper, a single-phase photovoltaic (PV) inverter fed by a boost converter to supply a freezer motor with variable DC input is investigated. The proposed circuit has two stages. Firstly, the DC output of the PV panel that varies between 150 and 300 V will be applied to the boost converter. The boost converter will boost the input voltage to a fixed 300 V DC. Next, this voltage is supplied to the single-phase full bridge inverter to obtain 230 V AC. In the end, The output of the inverter will feed a freezer motor. The PV panels can be stand-alone or grid-connected. The grid-connected PV is divided into two categories, such as with a transformer and without a transformer, a transformer type has galvanic isolation resulting in increasing the security and also provides no further DC current toward the grid, but it is expensive, heavy and bulky. The transformerless type holds high efficiency and it is cheaper, but it suffers from leakage current between PV and the grid. This paper proposes a stand-alone direct use of PV to supply a freezer; therefore, no grid connection will result in no leakage current between the PV and Grid. The proposed circuit has some features such as no filtering circuit at the output of the inverter, no battery in the system, DC-link instead of AC link that reduces no-loads, having a higher efficiency, and holding enough energy in the DC-link capacitor to get the motor started. The circuit uses no transformers, thus, it is cheaper and has a smaller size. In addition, the system does not require a complex pulse width modulation (PWM) technique, because the motor can operate with a pulsed waveform. The control strategy uses the PWM signal with the desired timing. With this type of square wave, the harmonics (5th and 7th) of the voltage are reduced. The experimental and simulation results are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed strategy.