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The application of photovoltaic (PV) systems for extracting water from the ground is a promising application to provide/supply water for irrigation, drinking and to fulfill the other daily basic needs in remote areas that are still struggling for electricity. Designed PV based water pumping system should be energy efficient, low cost, and robust with less maintenance requirement and most importantly should be safe enough as to be operated by common personal without need of any additional piece of training or skills. Also, in the case of PV water pumping systems, many times it may possible that family members of farmers may operate the system, therefore human safety should be considered as a major concern.
Authors (R. Kumar, 2014; V. Gali, 2016; P. Vtas, 2017) proposed a buck-boost converter-based PV water pumping system intending to reduce the required number of components and achieving overall good operational efficiency. The performance of the Zeta DC-DC converter for the PV water pumping system is illustrated in (R. Kumar, 2016). In the proposed configuration Zeta converter is responsible for global MPPT. The non-inverting output of SEPIC based DC-DC converter helps in a smooth, jerk-free run of DC motor and thus results in an increased life of DC motor. A PV based water pumping system consists of a SEPIC converter operating in buck-boost mode was presented in (R. Kumar, 2014). Application of SEPIC topology results in less number of components, simpler gate driver circuit along with low input current pulsation. Further authors in (T. Jayaraj, 2019) illustrated a KY converter fed solar water pumping system, which aims to reduce the voltage ripples along with a high transient response.
In order to reduce the complexity, cost and further optimizing the power output, authors (B. Singh, 2018) proposed a SE-CuCC (SEPIC-Cuk) converter, which was developed as a combination of Cuk and SEPIC converter, considering the advantages of both. The developed system is specially designed for applications in rural and remote areas. SEPIC-Cuk converter acts as a power optimizer between the PV system and the switched reluctance motor (SRM). Application of Luo DC-DC converter to implement MPPT operation in a PV based water pumping system was investigated in (A. R. Anjana, 2017). Implementation of Luo converter in such systems results in reduced output current ripples and also enables the extraction of enhanced PV energy by operating system’s PV modules at MPPT.
The concept of an integrated quadratic boost converter was applied for the PV water pumping system, taking advantage of high static voltage gain. Isolated Zeta and Quadratic boost converters (Meghna, 2018) were connected in a cascaded fashion to a PV system, formed of PV arrays connected in parallel and thus resulting in a PV system with low output voltage. Further, with the objective of efficient utilization of solar panels, authors in (K. Shah, 2017) demonstrated the operation of quadratic boost converter for MPPT operation of the system considering variations in irradiation patterns and ambient temperature values.
A single-stage, induction motor based solar water pumping system without any storage was proposed in (J. V. M. Caracas, 2014). A new converter topology derived from the concept of a two-inductor boost converter (TIBC) also known as the current-fed multi-resonant converter is developed. The proposed system configuration has the advantages of the reduced number of system stages along with the benefit of using an induction motor instead of DC motor in the system. A new modified central switch operated DC-DC converter-based PV irrigation system fed by SRM driven water pump was proposed (A. K. Mishra, 2017). The advantage of the proposed system was that it can extract available maximum PV power without utilizing an input electrolytic capacitor. Further, the operation of the presented system in continuous conduction mode (CCM) helps in reducing pulsations in current and thus it ensures continuous supply for motor pump operation. In order to enhance the power density of micro-inverters, multi-input DC-DC converters were proposed in (S. M. Tayebi, 2018), with the aim to connect multiple power sources (Z. Qian, 2010a, 2010b; H. Al-Atrash, 2006). However, the proposed topologies were derived from non-isolated Cuk, buck-boost, single-ended primary-inductor converter (SEPIC), and Zeta converters (A. Kwasinski, 2009; Y. Li, 2010; H.Wu, 2013) and therefore are categorized under non-isolated configurations and are not useful in applications where isolation is required.