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Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone / In today’s society we are faced with many problems that result from the use of traditional energy sources. Due to the lack of efficient alternative energy sources we are consistently trying to produce technologically advanced methods and tools to offset our dependency on traditional energy systems that are harming the planet as a whole. Every great accomplishment needs a starting point. The University of Arizona is going to an influential success story that gets the ball rolling. Implementing two energy saving tools known as photovoltaic panels and thermal water heating units will allow advocates to see the benefits that can come from sustainable technology. Through state and federal incentives solar panels are able to pay themselves off over the years in a majority of the states. Without federal or state incentives, the solar panels would not save the consumer enough money to repay their initial investment. Thermal water heating units save the consumer enough money to pay themselves off over the years. Overall both thermal water heating units and photovoltaic panels provide a clean source of energy.

Photovoltaic (solar electric) technology has shown significant potential as a source of practical and sustainable energy; this study focuses on increasing the performance of photovoltaic systems through the use of improved control and power interfaces. The main objective is to find an effective control algorithm and topology that are optimally suited to extracting the maximum power possible from photovoltaic modules. The thesis consists of the following primary subjects: photovoltaic modelling, the topological study of photovoltaic interfaces, the regulation of photovoltaic voltage, and maximum power tracking. In photovoltaic power systems both photovoltaic modules and switching mode converters present non-linear and time-variant characteristics, resulting in a difficult control problem. This study applies in-depth modelling and analysis to quantify these inherent characteristics,s pecifically using successive linearization to create a simplified linear problem. Additionally, Youla Parameterisation is employed to design a stable control system for regulating the photovoltaic voltage. Finally, the thesis focuses on two critical aspects to improve the performance of maximum power point tracking. One improvement is to accurately locate the position of the maximum power point by using centred differentiation. The second is to reduce the oscillation around the steady-state maximum power point by controlling active perturbations. Adopting the method of steepest descent for maximum power point tracking, which delivers faster dynamic response and a smoother steady-state than the hill climbing method, enables these improvements. Comprehensive experimental evaluations have successfully illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed control algorithm harvests about 1% more energy than the traditional method under the same evaluation platform and weather conditions without increasing the complexity of the hardware.

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