Power Circuit for Solar Boat with a Bidirectional Converter

The Internal Combustion (IC) Engine driven boats, which are commonly used, are not eco-friendly and will deplete the natural resources. A better alternative is to develop an economical, eco-friendly, and user-friendly system as a water transport system. This paper proposes design of the power circuit for a BLDC motor driven solar boat with a bidirectional converter. The proposed system can deliver power required to drive the boat with higher speed than the electric boats presently available and with better running time. The most interesting characteristic of the proposed system is that the same system can deliver AC power to charge other similar electric boats using its solar power alone through a bidirectional converter in the system, thus the system acts as an AC source. The Perturb and Observe (P & O) method is implemented for the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) of the solar panel. The photovoltaic (PV) power and rectified AC grid power are stored in the Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) battery system of the proposed electric boat. The paper provides a detailed analysis of the proposed system using MATLAB SIMULINK software. The proposed power circuit is suitable to drive a twenty five passenger capacity boat.