Mario Gommeringer, Alexander Schmitt, Felix Kammerer, Michael Braun

IECON 2015, 41st Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, Yokohama, Japan

This paper deals with a new ultra-efficient circuit for the individual maximum power point (MPP) tracking of an unlimited number of photovoltaic strings. The circuit generates a DC output voltage and can be combined with common DC-AC solar inverter circuits. The necessary blocking voltages of the transistors are far below the maximum string voltages, which yields to low losses and small passive components. An appropriate controller structure is developed and a prototype is built up, that reaches a maximum efficiency of 99.85 percent.