Abstract
There are many remote areas in the world where people are living without electricity and expanding the public grids to them are uneconomical. For this reason, this paper studies a dynamic behavior of the power flow in a stand-alone AC-coupled photovoltaic (PV) system to optimize the size of the system components based on the weather conditions of the selected site and the load power demands. This system consists of a PV generator, a battery storage system (BSS), a PV inverter, a battery inverter/charger, and an AC load power. The PV generator is intermittent source of energy, so this system has to be combined with a BSS to organize the energy between the PV generator and the load. The power management uses the fuzzy power management controller to optimize the system performance by distributing the power inside the system and by managing the charge and discharge of power flow for the BSS. Real-time meteorological data of the site under study and practical load profile of a small household are used as inputs for the proposed management system. The results of the proposed system showed a good performance under various operating conditions, and maintained the state of charge of BSS at a reasonable level. In addition, the results gave a clear visualization of the behavior of the switched-mode power supply to regulate the power flow between the sources and the load on one side and to match between all components of the system on the other side. The main contributions of this work are the ability to give a mathematical model of the all components of the system and the control management which determine an optimal design of the system at any site.