ABSTRACT
Today, photovoltaic (PV) conversion chains are generally designed much more as prototypes than as industrial products. As a consequence, design and implementation of such systems are very expensive. To reduce the cost and converge towards industrial processes, we ought to design tools that will help to obtain easily optimal PV chains adapted to a wide range of power and loads. To achieve this goal, it seems to be more logical to use a distributed approach of the power conversion between PV generators and loads compared to one inverter with its efficiency optimised for the maximum power delivered. This principle leads us to design an elementary conversion chain that we have optimised through simulations and that we are currently implementing as a real prototype. In this article, we describe our chain and focus on its PV generator modelling. We illustrate the validity of this model in different normal and degraded radiation conditions. Finally, we show the behaviour of our PV conversion chain in inhomogeneous radiation cases.
