Investigation of the double input power converter with N stages of voltage multiplier using PSO-based MPPT technique for the thermoelectric energy harvesting system

摘要

This research work presents a thermoelectric energy harvesting system comprises of a double input DC-DC converter with maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique under varying temperature conditions (VTCs). The converter has two inputs with N stages of diode-capacitor to boost the output voltage. It has the advantages of higher voltage gain and flexibility of power-sharing by both the independent sources. The perturb and observe (P&O)-based MPPT algorithm is an efficient and simple method to track the maximum power. However, the power-current (P-I) characteristics of the thermoelectric modules exhibit multiple peaks at VTCs; it fails to identify the global peak point (GPP) and gets track the local peak point. To overcome the drawback of the P&O technique, a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based MPPT technique is implemented to track the GPP. A comparison is performed between the P&O and PSO technique in terms of MPPT tracking efficiency and oscillation around the maximum power point. From the acquired results of simulation and experiment, it is recommended that the PSO-based MPPT technique has furnished better overall performance.