Bi-Directional DC-DC Converter for the DC House Project

This paper presents a project that was developed with the purpose of creating an efficient energy management system for the DC House project, with a centralized 12V battery system fed by a 48V Multiple Input Single Output Source (MISO). The energy management system will consist of a bidirectional DC-DC converter. During the day when the renewable sources produce enough energy to fulfill the load's energy demand, the converter will make use of the excess energy by taking a 48V DC input and stepping it down to a 12V DC output in order to charge a 12V 100Ah battery. When renewable sources can no longer supply the energy required by the load the necessary energy will be pulled from the 12V battery. The converter at this time will take the 12V DC input from the battery and step it up to a 48V output connected to DC House load. The proposed design was tested using LTSpice simulation whose results showed that the converter can indeed provide the bi-directional power flow as desired. Simulation results showed that the proposed design was able to meet the less than 2% line and load regulation requirements. Furthermore, the efficiency of the proposed converter was measured to be around 85% at full load.