A coreless maximum power point tracking circuit of thermoelectric generators for battery charging systems

We have proposed and fabricated a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) circuit for thermoelectric generator (TEG) without digital controller unit. The experimental and simulation results from the proposed MPPT circuit employing the boost cascaded-with-buck converter dealt with rapid variation of temperature and abrupt changes of load current have shown that the proposed method allows stable operation with high power transfer efficiency. The main advantage of proposed method is analog tracking circuit by sampling half V_oc level without DSP or micro controller unit for calculating peak power point by iterative methods. The proposed MPPT circuit has a merit in cost and miniaturization of a system compared to conventional MPPT algorithms.