HM/PWM Seamless Control of a Bidirectional Buck-Boost Converter for a Photovoltaic Application

The versatile buck-boost dc/dc converter is found suitable for a particular photovoltaic application that requires either a voltage step-up or a voltage step-down operation injecting the maximum available current into an intermediate-voltage battery. It is proposed to implement the converter control stage providing seamless changes between the step-up (boost) and step-down ( buck) operating modes. Based on the sliding-mode control technique, a hysteretic-modulation-based (HM) controller is designed allowing the tuning of the switching frequency around either of the two possible operating points. The introduction of minor modifications into the HM implementation results in a pulsewidth modulation controller that preserves the seamless changing features between buck and boost working modes while providing a fixed switching frequency. Experimental results demonstrate that both solutions allow the converter input voltage control by showing a perfect tracking of 1-kHz square-type references, similar to those provided by a classical perturb-and-observe (P&O) MPPT algorithm but much faster.