Design and Simulation of a Solar Power System Oriented for Mobile Base Station Sites

Due to the importance of the availability of mobile communication network operation service, this paper aims to design a solar energy-based power system for mobile communication base station site with wide range exploitation of solar energy. The system considers the design that uses solar energy as the only available source of power to minimize call traffic losses due to the absence of electricity sources. Two main design aspects are involved in this work; first is the solar array design with a high range of operation within solar current-voltage I-V characteristic exploiting by such design, sun irradiance from highest to lowest level. The second design aspect is the DC-to-DC power conversion which targets to convert the wide-range voltage output of the solar array to a constant BTS load voltage defined by the base station manufacturer. MATLAB package coding and SIMULINK models were carried out and results obtained showing a controllable PWM modulation index maintain the constant DC output load voltage with very low harmonic distortion content.