Smart home: A solar based stand-alone system

The objective of this thesis is to design and simulate the solar based stand-alone electrical energy model using MATLAB/SIMULINK software for smart home. Here in this solar based stand-alone system the home is not grid-tied to any local utility, but a battery energy storage system (BESS) is used as a primary backup source. The area under interest selected here is Rockford---a Northwest Suburb of Chicago. The various solar data for the Rockford Area (Latitude 42.5, Longitude 89.5) was collected from the NASA Surface meteorology and solar energy website. And a load profile for a generic home was assumed based on the Official energy Statistics of the U.S government [1]. This stand-alone system involves a solar panel, Boost Converter, Maximum Power Point Tracker, DC/AC Inverter, Bidirectional Converter and Battery as its major Simulink blocks. The objective is to provide 24/7 highly efficient and economically feasible green and clean solar powered electricity. During the day time the residential loads are supported by the solar panels, which also charge the battery. During the night time the battery is used as a primary source for distributing power to the various domestic appliances of the home. The charging and discharging current is controlled by the bidirectional converter based on the State of Charge (SOC) of the Nickel Metal-Hydride (NiMH) battery bank.;The objective of this thesis is to illustrate that using the proposed MATLAB/SIMULINK solar stand alone model, the average daily load requirement of a generic Rockford home of 45.6kWh/day is achieved. It was determined that in order to meet this load requirement an array of 46 solar panels (2 in Series and 23 in parallel) are required. PV system supplies the desired 15.6 kWh of energy during the day time. In order to meet the night load, a battery storage system of 30 kWh (48V, 625 Ah) is employed. Therefore the simulation done using MATLAB/SIMULINK software validates the feasibility of this solar stand alone system.