Solar Powered Water Pumping System Employing Switched Reluctance Motor Drive

This paper presents a solar photovoltaic array fed water pumping system employing a switched reluctance motor (SRM) drive. The electronic commutation of the SRM drive at fundamental frequency offers reduced switching losses in a mid-point converter and considerably increases the efficiency of proposed system. The speed of SRM is controlled by varying the dc-bus voltage of the mid-point converter. A dc–dc Cuk converter operating in continuous conduction mode (CCM) is used for dc-bus voltage control. The CCM operation of inductors helps to reduce the ringing effect and decreases the losses of dc–dc converter. Current and voltage stresses on devices including switching stress of Cuk converter are also reduced in CCM. The Cuk converter facilitates the continuous and smooth input/output currents to SRM drive with boundless region for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) operation. The adjustment in step size of an incremental conductance MPPT algorithm facilitates the soft starting of SRM drive. The proposed system, subjected to dynamically atmospheric conditions is designed, modeled, and simulated using MATLAB/Simulink environment. A prototype of proposed configuration is also developed and its performance is validated with test results for the control of speed over varying insolation levels.