Team Objective
The MSU solar car racing team is a student run organization that designs and builds solar vehicles. The vehicle created each year is taken to Arizona where it then races in the Formula Sun Grand Prix as well as the American Solar Challenge.
Our mission is to design and build a device called a Maximum Power Point Tracker (MPPT). A MPPT is a very important part of the solar car because it links the solar array on top of the vehicle to the vehicle's battery. The MPPT is needed so that the relatively low voltage of the array matches the high voltage of the battery.
In order to complete our project we will use a DC-DC boost converter so that the voltage of the array and the battery match as well as a microcontroller that will employ a tracking algorithm. This algorithm will adjust the voltage very slightly so that the vehicle receives maximum power no matter what the illumination level gets. The most important requirement of our project is to make sure that we are achieving the best efficiency possible. Our ultimate goal is for the MPPT to reach and maintain an efficiency of 95%.