New distributed architecture of power management for photovoltaic applications

The active research on materials and photovoltaic systems management of this energy are the basis of this progress. LAAS laboratory has been working for several years in this context of improvement and optimization of electrical energy produced by photovoltaic array. Much work has shown the benefit to insert an adaptation stage between the photovoltaic arrays (PV) and load in order to optimize the energy transferred. This stage, controlled by an MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking), allows to always searching the maximum power delivered by the PV module. To increase yet the energy performance of solar systems, new works were directed towards a highly distributed architecture. This approach, consisting in dividing the PV generator in several parts, helps to bring closer photovoltaic cells and thus maximize the electrical power they can produce. In this work, we have developed prototypes of micro-converters dedicated to low power photovoltaic applications. A new test bench has been built to make energy balances of different systems used over periods of one or more days of operation. These measures have enabled us to study with precision the benefit of the distributed architecture and obtain validation results showing future prospects. (author)