Backstepping Control of a Buck-Boost Converter in an Experimental PV-System

• DOI: 10.6113/jpe.2015.15.6.1584
• Publication Date: 2016-03-07T04:40:52Z
• Authors: Jesus R. Vazquez; Aranzazu D. Martin
• Keywords: Maximum power principle; Buck converter

This paper presents a nonlinear method to control a DC-DC converter and track the Maximum Power Point (MPP) of a Photovoltaic (PV) system. A backstepping controller is proposed to regulate the voltage at the input of a buck-boost converter by means of Lyapunov functions. To make the control initially faster and avoid local maximum, a regression plane is used to estimate the reference voltages that must be obtained to achieve the MPP and guarantee the maximum power extraction, modifying the conventional Perturb and Observe (P&O) method. An experimental platform has been designed to verify the validity and performance of the proposed control method. In this platform, a buck-boost converter has been built to extract the maximum power of commercial solar modules under different environmental conditions.