Solar Powered E-Rickshaw with Minimum Losses

The current solar-assisted E-rickshaws typically utilize a single solar panel for battery charging. This research paper suggests an enhancement to the existing solutions by incorporating two solar panels connected in parallel strings, with each string containing a series capacitor. One solar panel is mounted on top of the E-rickshaw, while the other is positioned on the backside. This arrangement enables the collection of a greater amount of solar energy, ultimately leading to a significant increase in the E-rickshaw’s daily range compared to the single-panel approach. Rather than employing a conventional central converter-based solar battery charger, this paper employs a partial power processing scheme based on a buck converter. This scheme ensures precise Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) for both solar panels, enabling the efficient harvesting of the maximum available solar energy. By utilizing a dedicated dc-dc converter-based parallel power processing scheme, the ratings of components (especially current) are reduced, lessening the power processing burden on the converters. Moreover, this scheme can also be applied to supply solar power from two different PV panels mounted at different angles on a rooftop to a DC-micro grid. The functionality and control procedures of this scheme have been verified through simulation-based work conducted on the PSIM platform.