Designing optimal solar water pumping stations for irrigation of agricultural lands

An investigation into the design of a stand-alone solar water pumping station for supplying rural areas is presented. It includes a study of system components and their modeling. The solar water pumping station comprises a solar panel, DC/DC buck converter, DC motor driving a centrifugal pump, and a reservoir. The fuzzy-based maximum power point tracker is developed to optimize the drive speed and the water discharge rate of the coupled centrifugal pump. These use dN/I, d(dN/dI) use parameters, and a variation of the fill factor∆α as input variables. The proposed solution is based on a judicious fuzzy adjustment of a converter fill factor, which adapts online the load impedance to the solar panel. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the drive system for both transient and steady-state operations. Hence, it is suitable to use this fuzzy logic procedure as a standard optimization algorithm for such solar water pumping stations. The modeling is carried out in MATLAB/Simulink.