Design, Construction and Performance Evaluation of Solar Charge Controller for Street Lighting Application

Abstract

Solar powered equipment and applications are gradually making their ways into various sector of our day to day life. We need a storage or battery to store the solar energy harnessed during day. A Solar Charge Controller (SCC) which is a part of a solar power system has been designed using Proteus Software, to maintain batteries used in solar power harvesting and utilization in a charged state, without risk of over-charging or over-discharging, ensuring battery durability. The charge controller has battery management system in built, responsible for executing the desired charging algorithm based on the battery chemistry characteristics. After the circuit design and construction, tests like Power Supply test, Accuracy test, charging test and discharging test were conducted. From the results of the tests, the power supply met its requirement to out-put a constant voltage of 5Vfor the microcontroller and LCD circuit.  The charging test result shows the charging characteristics of the charge controller. The discharging test result is a negative linear graph showing that the battery is discharging from 14.4 V to about 9.5 V where the microcontroller disconnected the battery from the load.  The results showed that the charge controller was able to control and regulate the charging process well. Calculated Mean percentage error was 0.04.