Development of PSO for tracking Maximum Power Point of Photovoltaic Systems

For a photovoltaic system, the relationship of the output voltage and power is usually non-linear, so it is essential to equip a MPPT controller in PV systems. Furthermore, the hotspot problem is a common phenomenon, resulting from the PV system operating under PSC. Partial shading not only damages the PV cells, but also makes it difficult to find the global MPP in the characteristic curves of P-V. The paper proposes a novel version of PSO, namely PPSO in order to detect the global peak among the multiple peaks, known as the true maximum energy from PV panel. For this, the PPSO algorithm makes the velocity of each particle be perturbed once the particles are struck into a local minima state in order to find the best optimum solution in the MPPT problem. The perturbation in the velocity vector of each particle not only helps them tracking the MPP accurately under the changing environmental conditions, such as large fluctuations of insolation and temperature like PSC; but also removes the steady-state oscillation. The proposed approach has been tested on a MPPT system, which controls a dc-dc boost converter connected in series with a resistive load. Moreover, the obtained results are compared to those obtained without any MPPT controller to prove the efficiency of the suggested method. In addition, this novel version gives the highest accuracy of tracking the optimum power in the least iteration number as compared to the conventional PSO.