A standalone photovoltaic energy storage application with positive pulse current battery charging

In this paper, an innovative standalone photovoltaic (PV) energy storage application is introduced that can charge battery -powered road vehicles and helps to reduce the electrical grid burden in the future. The application couples a PV module and a lithium -ion (Li -ion) battery via an electrical power converter, i.e., a Cuk converter. First, the performance of the proposed application is completely analyzed with the mathematical modeling of the PV module, Cuk converter, and Li -ion battery. Furthermore, an advanced positive -pulse -current (PPC) battery charge control algorithm is combined with the popular hill -climbing PV MPPT in order to extend the battery life while fetching maximum PV energy. In order to extend the battery life, the PPC charge cycle allows no energy delivery during the half -cycle time, named the rest period. From an energy conversion efficiency point of view, the comparative results illustrate that a single converter and a single battery operation with PPC gains 95.73%, and a double converter and double batteries with "in-phase"PPC operation gains 94.4%. In both of these operations, the PV module delivers half the energy of nearly 19 J due to a rest period in the PPC charge cycle. However, a double converter and double batteries with "out-of-phase"PPC operation gain the highest efficiency 96.5% with full PV energy of 39.56 J. Therefore, the "out-of-phase"PPC operation is mostly recommended for standalone PV energy storage applications. Finally, an experimental hardware setup is developed to test the PPC charge algorithm with a resistive load and to validate the proposed application for different PPC operations with Li -ion batteries.