Maximum Power Point Tracking Algorithm for Advanced Photovoltaic Systems

Photovoltaic (PV) systems are the major nonconventional sources for power generation for present power strategy. The power of PV system has rapid increase because of its unpolluted, less noise and limited maintenance. But whole PV system has two main disadvantages drawbacks, that is, the power generation of it is quite low and the output power is nonlinear, which is influenced by climatic conditions, namely environmental temperature and the solar irradiation. The natural limiting factor is that PV potential in respect of temperature and irradiation has nonlinear output behavior. An automated power tracking method, for example, maximum power point tracking (MPPT), is necessarily applied to improve the power generation of PV systems. The MPPT methods undergo serious challenges when the PV system is under partial shade condition because PV shows several peaks in power. Hence, the exploration method might easily be misguided and might trapped to the local maxima. Therefore, a reasonable exploratory method must be constructed, which has to determine the global maxima for PV of shaded partially. The traditional approaches namely constant voltage tracking (CVT), perturb and observe (P&O), hill climbing (HC), Incremental Conductance (INC), and fractional open circuit voltage (FOCV) methods, indeed some of their improved types, are quite incompetent in tracking the global MPP (GMPP). Traditional techniques and soft computing-based bio-inspired and nature-inspired algorithms applied to MPPT were reviewed to explore the possibility for research while optimizing the PV system with global maximum output power under partially shading conditions. This paper is aimed to review, compare, and analyze almost all the techniques that implemented so far. Further this paper provides adequate details about algorithms that focuses to derive improved MPPT under non-uniform irradiation. Each algorithm got merits and demerits of its own with respect to the converging speed, computing time, complexity of coding, hardware suitability, stability and so on

Design of Improved Soft Computing based Maximum Power Point Tracking System for Operational Efficiency Enhancement of Solar Photovoltaic Energy System

The most promising renewable energy source is solar energy, which has enormous potential but has not yet been fully investigated or converted into useful power. The process of converting solar radiation into electrical power is marked by fluctuations in output and waste. These losses are associated with the processes of conversion, transformation, and usage. Temperature, irradiance, and shade are the main operating conditions that affect how well a solar photovoltaic system performs. The efficiency with which power is converted from the panel to the load determines the operational efficiency. Charge controllers are made to convert solar photovoltaic power into electricity for an external circuit. The goal of the research is to look into efficient algorithms that can improve the solar photovoltaic energy system's operating efficiency. In order to increase the operational efficiency of solar photovoltaic systems, research is concentrated on developing maximum power point tracking systems (MPPT) under a variety of operating scenarios, including partial shade and fluctuating irradiance. The performance of the system under various operating conditions has been investigated through the simulation of an equivalent mathematical model. A unique method for charge controller duty cycle control and solar system cooling has been developed. It is based on hybridization of PV-T System and cuckoo search optimization. Simulations of the suggested system have been run under standard, complex, and changing shading pattern and operating conditions. Simulations have shown that the devised method performs better in terms of tracked power, tracking time, and tracking stability. Comparing the suggested research to heuristic approaches based on conventional and soft computing, the solar photovoltaic system's operational performance is much improved

Design of Hybrid Solar Wind Energy System in a Microgrid with MPPT Techniques

DC Microgrid is one feasible and effective solution to integrate renewable energy sources as well as to supply electricity. This paper proposes a DC microgrid with enhanced Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) techniques for wind and solar energy systems. In this paper, the PV system power generation is enhanced by introducing a two-model MPPT technique that combines incremental conductance and constant voltage MPPT algorithms. Also, for the Wind Energy Conversion System (WECS) with pitch angle controlling technique, an Optimal Power Control MPPT technique is added. The Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation technique is introduced on grid side converter to improve the supply to the grid. The performance of proposed system is analyzed and the efficiency obtained with these methods is enhanced as compared with the previous methods

Enhancement of On-grid PV System under Irradiance and Temperature Variations Using New Optimized Adaptive Controller

Solar Energy is one of the key solutions to future electrical power generation. Photovoltaic Plants (PV) are fast growing to satisfy electrical power demand. Different maximum power point tracking techniques (MPPT) are used to maximize PV systems generated power. In this paper, on grid PV system model in MATLAB SIMULINK is tested under sudden irradiance and cell temperature variations. Incremental Conductance MPPT is used to maximize generated power from the PV system with the help of new adaptive controller to withstand these heavy disturbances. The new adaptive controller is tuned for optimal operation using two different optimization techniques (Invasive weed and Harmony search).Optimization results for the two techniques are compared. .A robustness test is made to check system stability to withstand different random irradiance and cell temperature patterns without failure to track the maximum power point.Finally, a brief comparison is made with a previous literature and the new adaptive controller gives better results

A Review on Photo Voltaic MPPT Algorithms

A photovoltaic generator exhibits nonlinear voltage-current characteristics and its maximum power point varies with solar radiation and cell temperature. A Dc/Dc power converter is used to match the photovoltaic system to the load and to operate the PV (photo voltaic) cell array at maximum power point. Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) is a process which tracks one maximum power point from PV array input, varying the ratio between the voltage and current delivered to get the most power it can. There are different techniques proposed with lot of algorithms are being used in the MPPT controller to extract the maximum power. It is very difficult for the photo voltaic designers, researchers and academic experts to select a particular MPPT technique for a particular application which requires the background knowledge and comparative features of various MPPT algorithms. This paper will be avaluable source for those who work in the photo voltaic generation, so its objective is to review the main MPPT algorithms in practice and analyzes the merits and demerits with various factors

Design of an optimum MPPT controller for solar energy system

Solar energy is compared to be the best potential source of renewable energy in Pacific region. For this reason a photovoltaic cell is needed to harvest this kind of energy, gathering the most of it and the PV having a good efficiency. The maximum efficiency is achieved when the PV works at its Maximum Power Point which entirely depends on the irradiation and temperature. This paper proposes a new design of hybrid Maximum Power Point Tracking and a comparative study is made with various existing MPPT techniques which include Perturb and Observe method, Incremental Conductance and Fuzzy Logic. From the comprehensive comparison study between existing MPPT technique and the proposed MPPT technique/theory, a hardware setup was demonstrated to verify the proposed design by charge controller in photovoltaic systems to which maximize the output power under various lighting conditions. The design is based on the computed results using the buck-boost DC-DC conveter. From the simulation, the proposed method tends to show better performance with almost no oscillations around the MPP

Performance analysis of grid-tied photovoltaic system under varying weather condition and load

Model and simulation of the impact of the distribution grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) system feeding a variable load with its control system have been investigated in this study. Incremental Conductance (IncCond) algorithm based on maximum power point tracking (MPPT) was implemented for the PV system to extract maximum power under different weather conditions when solar irradiation varies between 250W/m2 and 1000W/m2. The proposed system is modelled and simulated with MATLAB/Simulink tools. Under different weather conditions, the dynamic performance of the PV system is evaluated. The results obtained show the efficacy of the proposed MPPT method in response to rapid daytime weather variations. The results also show that the surplus power generated is injected into the grid when the injected power from the PV system is higher than the load demand; otherwise, the grid supplies the load

VHDL Based Maximum Power Point Tracking of Photovoltaic Using Fuzzy Logic Control

It is important to have an efficient maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique to increase the photovoltaic (PV) generation system output efficiency. This paper presents a design of MPPT techniques for PV module to increase its efficiency. Perturb and Observe method (P&O), incremental conductance method (IC), and Fuzzy logic controller (FLC) techniques are designed to be used for MPPT. Also FLC is built using MATLAB/ SIMULINK and compared with the FLC toolbox existed in the MATLAB library. FLC does not need knowledge of the exact model of the system so it is easy to implement. A comparison between different techniques shows the effectiveness of the fuzzy logic controller techniques.  Finally, the proposed FLC is built in very high speed integrated circuit description language (VHDL). The simulation results obtained with ISE Design Suite 14.6 software show a satisfactory performance with a good agreement compared to obtained values from MATLAB/SIMULINK. The good tracking efficiency and rapid response to environmental parameters changes are adopted by the simulation results