Association of Recycled PC PSU with MPPT and a Control Application in a Smartphone

This paper studies some original solutions for rural electrification based on re-used components according to the frugal innovation concept. Several associations of recycled PSUs from PCs, for an hybrid renewable energy system (PV and hydro) are presented and investigated. The objective is to increase the system power by associating several units. These power supply's converters can be controlled as battery chargers and supervised by MPPT algorithms implemented in an Arduino microcontroller. The different configurations for serial/parallel associations of the inputs or the outputs are investigated in terms of feasibility, robustness, and performance trough simulation and experimental results. Moreover, the settings of the whole system are given to the microcontroller by an application implemented in an Android smartphone.