Low-Cost Photovoltaic Maximum Power Point Tracking Project for Autonomous Electric Vehicle Prototype

The storage of electric energy is still one of the major bottlenecks found in the evolution of the electric vehicle industry, but with the evolution of material technology, batteries have been increasing their ratio capacity/mass, directly impacting the growth of this technology. As this is still a problem, alternatives are sought to increase the autonomy of electric vehicles, the main one being the implementation of embedded photovoltaic generation systems, which convert solar energy into usable electric energy in the vehicle. These embedded photovoltaic systems need a power flow control system because, due to the variation of irradiation that the panel receives, there are variations on voltage and current sent to the vehicle, which is a problem to his electric system. In order to maintain the correct operation and achieve a greater power efficiency of the photovoltaic system, it is necessary to study and design a Maximum Power Point Tracking system. Within this power control model, will be used in the prototype, one of the most simple methods is this the Perturb and Observe, which is a simple comparison of samples and can be easily implemented in low-cost Arduino hardware. Thus, the energy efficiency of systems is crucial because the lack of a project and adequate control can generate instability, and low power efficiency in general, impairing the operation and autonomy. Therefore, this paper presents the design of a photovoltaic control system to be implemented in an autonomous vehicle prototype applied to engineer education and, in the future, precision agriculture.