Design and development of different adaptive MPPT controllers for renewable energy systems: a comprehensive analysis

As of now, all over the world is focusing on the Electric Vehicle (EV) technology because its features are low environmental pollution, less maitainence cost required, high robustness, and good dynamic response. Also, the EVs work continuously until the input fuel is provided to the fuel stack. Here, a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is used as an input source to the electric vehicle system because of its merits fast startup, and quick response. However, the PEMFC gives nonlinear voltage versus current characteristics. As a result, the extraction of maximum power from the fuel stack is very difficult. The main aim of this work is to study different Maximum Power Point Tracking Techniques (MPPT) for the DC-DC converter-fed PEMFC system. The studied MPPT controllers are Adjusted Step Value of Perturb & Observe (ASV with P&O), Adaptive Step Size with Incremental Conductance (ASS with IC), Radial Basis Functional Network (RBFN), Incremental Step-Fuzzy Logic Controller (IS with FLC), Continuous Step Variation based Particle Swarm Optimization (CSV with PSO), and Adaptive Step Value-Cuckoo Search Algorithm (ASV with CSA). The selected MPPT controllers’ comprehensive study has been in terms of maximum power extraction, tracking speed of the MPP, settling time of the fuel stack output voltage, oscillations across the MPP, and design complexity. From the comprehensive performance results of the hybrid MPPT controllers, the ASV with CSA technique gives superior performance when equated to the other MPPT controllers.