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The increased number of digital devices such as sensors and other gadgets that work around the clock are a major part of the smart homes and future households. Continuous power supply and Internet connectivity are considered as a basic utility for any household. The smart city projects are also focusing on ensuring uninterrupted power supply to the area making it self-sufficient with power (Song et al., 2017). Furthermore, the smart grid concepts encourage local generation of electrical energy, preferably using renewable sources, and use it for household purposes or even supplying it to the power grid (Singh et al., 2019). In the current world, the development of a country is not only estimated through per capita income but also depends on energy production, energy utilization, crude oil production, etc. Among the above mentioned, energy production and management play a dominant role, so that systematic energy saving and consumption will be a responsibility of the citizen as well. In developing countries, government authorities instigate many policies and subsidies for renewable power utilization for instance solar, wind, etc. however to reduce and control the power consumption. In developing countries, an uninterrupted power supply from the grid is not yet a reliable source for the continuous consumption of electrical energy. Occasionally, the power supply gets interrupted, and in times of low power generation, the authorities may restrict the power supply, termed as load shedding (Faranda et al., 2007). To address this, the production and introduction of well efficient power electronics products, devices, and technologies for the conversion of power and storage bring a remarkable change in energy utilization and savings. This has led to the increased use of Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) units or inverter circuits.
On the other side, there is a usual high load on the grid during the peak hours (generally between 6 PM to 10 PM) (Praveen & Rao, 2020). The power inverters can play a crucial role during the peak time of power consumption as well. It is necessary to reduce the consumption from the grid during the peak hours when the electricity is in high demand. The use of a power inverter during peak hours instead of the supply from the grid reduces the load on the grid and thus helps to serve the requirements in a better way. To achieve this, the power inverter should supplement the grid supply, or even substitute it during peak hours. Thus the household connections do not take any power supply during peak hours from the service main.
Furthermore, it should be encouraged to have the maximum use of renewable sources of energy (Jha et al., 2020). If the battery used in the inverter circuit is charged using renewable sources of energy, it will also make it a better utilization of the renewable resources. For example, a solar-powered inverter circuit where the batteries are charged using solar energy in the daytime and then use the inverter circuit to convert the stored direct current to alternating current that can be used as a substitute for the grid supply during the peak hours make an energy efficient environment (Zhang et al., 2020). Such a setup mainly consists of three parts, a battery pack charged from solar panels, a single-phase inverter, and an automatic switch (Wang et al., 2017). In this paper, we propose a novel design for a smart inverter that can be used for household purposes. The proposed system helps to automatically switch household connections from grid to battery during the peak hours based on a real-time clock (RTC) (Kurian et al., 2018). These solar-powered inverters supplying power from a battery pack at peak hours enable the users not only to reduce the load on the grid but also will help the consumers to have monetary benefits by reducing the electricity bill in such a scenario.
The remaining sections of the paper are structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the state of the art regarding the inverter and major components related to the proposed automated inverter circuit, such as battery, control system for automation and solar cells. Section 3 describes the RTC based Inverter system followed by the design of different components in the circuit in section 4. Section 5 describes the simulation and hardware setup and section 6 analyses the performance of the proposed inverter circuit. Section 8 concludes the paper.