Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Solar Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/solener A comparative performance analysis of direct, with battery, supercapacitor, and battery-supercapacitor enabled photovoltaic water pumping systems using centrifugal pump Madhumita Das a , Ratan Mandal b, ⁎ a Applied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, Haldia Institute of Technology, Haldia, Purba Medinipur 721657, WB, India b School of Energy Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, WB, India ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Solar photovoltaics Battery Supercapacitor Water pumping ABSTRACT To operate centrifugal pump against higher discharge pressure and to achieve specific speed for delivering the water, the level of irradiance required is quite high. Therefore, by knowing the operating pressure this problem may be minimized by using energy storage devices like battery or supercapacitor operated in parallel with the SPV module. Here is the need to select a proper configuration of solar PV water pumping system (SPVWPS) using energy storage devices for the economic application. Therefore, a new approach is made towards studying different configurations of 7SPVWPS with battery and supercapacitors under varying discharge pressure and evaluate the performance parameters. Four different configurations of SPVWPS using centrifugal pump are considered, namely, directly coupled, with battery, with the supercapacitors and with a battery-supercapacitor hybrid, to determine the optimum configuration for higher system performance. The experiment have been carried out on a small scale SPVWPS with 2 m and 3 m dynamic head of the pump on sunny days at Haldia, India. The comparison of the performance for the different configurations have been reported. The study reveals that the supercapacitor based configuration give highest instantaneous efficiency. The centrifugal pump powered by SPVWPS using battery delivers a maximum of 2964 L per day for 2 m dynamic head whereas for 3 m dynamic head SPVWPS using supercapacitor delivers a maximum of 1826 L per day. An economic comparison is also done for the different topologies. 1. Introduction Advances in the photovoltaic (PV) technology has enabled many off- grid solar photovoltaic applications to flourish over the past decade. However, due to the low efficiency of solar PV panel and only day hour operation, this technology is yet at its developing phase. The solar photovoltaic off-grid applications are proven valuable in rural and re- mote areas, of many countries, including India. Solar photovoltaic water pumping (SPVWPS) is one of the important off-grid PV applica- tion which cater to the agriculture needs, drinking water supplies, rural household activities, livestock watering and also decentralized appli- cations like mining (Montorfano et al., 2016; Paredes-Sánchez et al., 2015). Researchers from the various corners of the world found SPVWPS more environment friendly and cost effective than that of diesel-based pumping systems (Muhsen et al., 2017; Rehman and Sahin, 2014). Many researchers have studied the performance of SPVWPS due to the variations of environmental and system parameters like solar radiation, pumping head, PV array size, moisture, shadow, wind speed and temperature and site characteristics. The effect due to the change in the pumping head (50 m, 60 m, 70 m and 80 m) for a DC helical pump has been analysed at Madinah for system efficiency (Benghanem et al., 2014). It has also proposed a model for the prediction of the flowrate of a SPVWPS for a given head. The impact of shadow on an SPV system has been investigated at Bejaia (Algeria) (Mohammedi et al., 2014). They have concluded that shading impact on a SPVWPS depends on the PV array size, the rate of shading and the module shaded area. In India, the effect of solar irradiance and temperature is studied on AC and DC submersible pumps with 50 m and 30 m head (Renu et al., 2017). The effect of insolation, PV array size and the pumping head is studied on a AC SPVWPS (Odeh et al., 2006). It has been analyzed that spraying water on the PV panel increases the mean PV efficiency, sub system and total efficiency and also reduces the threshold radiation to start the pump during the early morning for a SPVWPS (Abdolzadeh and Ameri, 2009). Optimum PV array configuration is found using DC submersible https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2018.06.069 Received 20 February 2018; Received in revised form 26 May 2018; Accepted 18 June 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: ratan_mandal99@yahoo.co.in (R. Mandal). Solar Energy 171 (2018) 302–309 0038-092X/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T