If you short the panel with a fet the power is lost in the panel there is no need to worry the heat produced is much less than that absorbed from the sun. They can stand being shorted indefinitely. As you correctly say the dissipation in the fet is virtually nothing.
Can't you just phase back the boost converter rather than short the panel?
Flux
> Can't you just phase back the boost converter rather than short the panel?
My total lack of experience shows! ... and thinking harder about at it, if I really did need to short the panel then I wouldn't need another FET like I was thinking, I have a perfectly good one right there in the middle of the booster; it could short the panel (through the booster's input coil.)
Thanks again, - Ed.[ Parent ]
I guess that the big cap I had on the input side of the booster wasn't nothing; it took forever (in computer time) for the voltage to rise. I found some inverse e to the t over tau formula that gave me about .1uF for 98% of my voltage in a 15 ms rise time... if I was using that formula correctly! Anyway, I did replace the big cap with a .1uF and it seems to be working okay.
Do I need any input cap for the booster circuit? I'm running the PWM at 72KHz so the inductor on-time is only a few microseconds. If the panel response time is on the order of a millisecond or so, it would seem like I wouldn't need an input cap at all... Does that sound right? (Perhaps I've been reading too much; I've been reading about component "stress" in SMPS'es and am concerned about "stressing" something...)
Thank you! - Ed.[ Parent ]
