Thesis. 1976. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Barker. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Roderick A. Hyde. / Ph.D.

Magíster en Análisis Sistémico Aplicado a la Sociedad / Se presenta en este informe de Tesis un análisis de las perspectivas de desarrollo de la Energía Solar observadas en el Solar Energy Research Center (SERC), en específico aquellas relacionadas con los ámbitos de Ciencia y Tecnología, Mercado y Políticas Públicas. Para ello, y a partir de metodologías cualitativas, se desarrollaron redes semánticas asociadas a cada ámbito señalado, indagando en las formas de procesamiento usadas por miembros del SERC para tratarlos. A partir de ello, se muestra el surgimiento de distintos niveles de complejidad en las formas de abordar el fenómeno y su incidencia en el proceso de estabilización de la Energía Solar en nuestro país, relevando el papel que el concepto de perspectiva tiene en la configuración del emergente campo solar en nuestro país

The objective of this research is to build a decision model for a comprehensive assessment of solar photovoltaic technologies using multiple perspectives. These perspectives include: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political (STEEP) with each perspective consisting of multiple criteria. Hierarchical decision modeling and expert judgment quantification are used to provide the relative ranking of the perspectives and criteria. Such modeling is effective in addressing technology evaluations with competing and contrasting perspectives and criteria where both quantitative and qualitative measurements are represented. The model is then operationalized by constructing desirability functions for each criterion. The combined results provide an overall numerical score for each technology under consideration as well as criteria desirability gaps. This model is useful for assessing photovoltaic technologies from varying worldviews such as the electric utility worldview, the photovoltaic manufacturer's worldview, or the national policy worldview. This model can also provide guidance to decision makers and practitioners on areas of improvement for a selected technology. The research utilizes the electric utility worldview as a case study.

The needs to the sustainable development of electricity, energy efficiency improvement, and environment pollution reduction have favored the development of distributed generation (DG). But the problems come with increasing DG penetration in distribution networks. This thesis presents the Solar Energy Grid Integration System (SEGIS) Stage III project done by Portland General Electric (PGE), Advanced Energy, Sandia National Lab on a PGE selected distribution feeder. The feeder has six monitored commercial solar PV systems connected. The total power output from the PV systems has the potential to reach 30% of the feeder load. The author analyzes the performance of the solar feeder on both generation and voltage effects. As a project report, it introduced a new islanding detection done by other team members to give an islanding solution of future high penetration distribution networks. At last, the author describes micro-grid and grid support concepts in a SEGIS concept paper with some examples.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The existing topologies of solar micro inverter use a number of stages before the DC input voltage can be converted to AC output voltage. These stages may contain one or more power converters. It may also contain a diode rectifier, transformer and filter. The number of active and passive components is very high. In this thesis, the design of a new solar micro inverter is proposed. This new micro inverter consists of a new single switch inverter which is obtained by modifying the already existing single ended primary inductor (SEPIC) DC-DC converter. This new inverter is capable of generating pure sinusoidal waveform from DC input voltage. The design and operation of the new inverter are studied in detail. This new inverter works with a controller to produce any kind of output waveform. The inverter is found to have four different modes of operation. The new inverter is modeled using state space averaging. The system is a fourth order system which is non-linear due to the inherent switching involved in the circuit. The system is linearized around an operating point to study the system as a linear system. The control to output transfer function of the inverter is found to be non-minimum phase. The transfer functions are studied using root locus. From the control perspective, the presence of right half zero makes the design of the controller structure complicated. The PV cell is modeled using the cell equations in MATLAB. A maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique is implemented to make sure the output power of the PV cell is always maximum which allows full utilization of the power from the PV cell. The perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm is the simplest and is used here. The use of this new inverter eliminates the various stages involved in the conventional solar micro inverter. Simulation and experimental results carried out on the setup validate the proposed structure of inverter.