Design and development of solar energy system for use in isolated home in Singapore

Abstract

Renewable energy has been a research area of exponentially increasing interest since the past decade along with the more attention that people pay to environment and energy problems. The growing demand for clean sources of energy has expanded dramatically in recent years as conventional energy like oil becomes scarce and more expensive. Because of this growth, it has lead to demand for searching alternative source energy. Therefore, the aim of this project is to build a solar energy system in an isolated home. This project focuses on two parts. It started on design and development of the inverter system. The inverter system consist of a basic DC-DC boost converter topology to boost the DC voltage from the charge controller to a higher voltage level for the DC-AC inverter and the single-phase full bridge inverter to converter the DC voltage to an AC voltage at 50Hz.The second part followed by designing a battery charger/controller, so as to store electrical energy during the day for use at night. Simulations were carried out using PSIM and Circuitmaker software for verification before hardware circuits were developed for actual implementation.