A control strategy for power management in a PV-battery hybrid system with MPPT

The paper presents a control strategy which manages the power flow between a Photovoltaic (PV) module, battery and the load. Since PV system provides an unregulated voltage output, it is regulated to a desired voltage level and then given to the charge controller, which distributes the power between battery and load. To extract acme power from PV system, a Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) scheme is employed. The excess energy left, after meeting the load demand, is stored in the battery. The stored energy is utilized to meet the future load demands, when there is a power deficit from the PV system. Hence power requirement of the load is managed. Also a comparison between the three commonly used MPPT techniques: Perturb & Observe (P&O) algorithm, Incremental Conductance (IC) algorithm and Fractional Open Circuit Voltage (FOCV) algorithms is done and the most suitable technique is employed for the hybrid system. When the battery is fully charged, the excess power is absorbed by the dump load, which is also managed by the charge controller. The entire hybrid system is simulated and verified in the MATLAB/Simulink platform.