Regulating control circuit for photovoltaic source employing switches, energy storage, and pulse width modulation controller

摘要

A regulating circuit controls current flow from a photovoltaic power source (20) to a storage battery (38) to improve the conversion of solar energy to electric energy. Two transistors (22, 30) are switched on and off at high frequency to regulate the average current flow to the battery. A pulse-width-modulator control chip (42) varies the on-time of each transistor independently to provide separate control of source voltage and circuit output voltage. The source is regulated to produce maximum power and the output voltage is regulated to provide an optimum battery charging voltage. The maximum available energy is transferred from the source to the battery, thereby improving the conversion efficiency of the system.