This paper presents a performance analysis of a
new cascaded boost converter for low voltage (LV) residential DC
microgrid. Photovoltaic (PV) systems are getting high attention as
a renewable energy resource for LV DC microgrid applications.
Partial Shading (PS) is a serious issue in PV systems as it leads to
a significant reduction in power generation. The conventional
boost converter topology is usually employed to mitigate the
mismatch issue between the PV arrays or modules caused by the
PS problem. In some cases, the PV module is divided into three
submodules (SMs) where a bypass diode is integrated with each
SM to protect the PV module from the hot spot (HS) effect. The
mismatch problem between the SMs inside a single PV module can
result in a significant reduction in power generation caused by
isolating the shaded SM from the PV system. However, isolating
the SM from the PV system can mitigate the HS negative effect at
the expense of losing the power of the shaded PV SM. This paper
suggests a PV SM DC-DC cascaded boost converter to overcome
the mismatch concern between the PV SM of a single PV module
in the modern DC microgrid. It employed a Perturb and Observe
(P&O) tracing algorithm with each PV SM to individually harvest
the maximum available power. The study proposes an optimized
operating strategy based on PV power generation, local demand,
and battery state of charge (SOC) to enhance the reliability of the
DC microgrid system.