Shrinking water resources for irrigation purposes is a foremost global challenge for sustainable agriculture to produce human food and animal feed. Thus, it is so important to transmit water to agricultural lands using a variety of tools such as pipes and pumps. It is established that most pumps are either powered by fossil fuels such as petrol, diesel, etc. or electrical energy from a utility. However, due to the pollution generated by burning fossil fuels and shortages in electricity distribution, it is crucial to use renewable energy resources such as solar energy to power electric water pumps for irrigation. The current paper proposes a design of a stand–alone transformer-less DC/AC converter powered by photovoltaic (PV) panels. The design consists of a cascade boost (CB) DC/DC converter coupled with a five-level inverter. The role of the CB converter is to achieve Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) using a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC). Whereas, the role of the five-level inverter is to provide a constant AC voltage to drive a 1 hp “single-phase induction motor (SPIM)”. A 4800 W system is designed to operate several SPIM motors for irrigation purposes. The proposed system is successfully simulated using MATLAB SIMULINK. © 2022
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1071-1078
Number of pages8
JournalMaterials Today: Proceedings
Volume80
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Materials Science

ID: 38497344