Real-Time Experimental Assessment of Hill Climbing MPPT Algorithm Enhanced by Estimating a Duty Cycle for PV System

Better functioning of maximum power point tracking (MPPT) can significantly increase the energy efficiency of photovoltaic systems. This process is provided by MPPT algorithms. Such as fractional open-circuit voltage, perturb and observe, fractional short-circuit current, hill climbing, incremental conductance, fuzzy logic controller, neural network controller, just to name a few. The hill climbing algorithm uses the duty cycle of the boot converter as a retraction parameter when the MPPT task is performed. However, this technique has disadvantages in terms of the stability of the system during periods of constant radiation. To overcome this disadvantage, A MPPT technique based on the estimation of the boost converter duty cycle associated with the conventional hill climbing, fractional open-circuit voltage and fractional short-circuit current algorithm is proposed. A comprehensive description of the experimental implementation hardware and software platforms is presented. On the basis of the measured data, the enhanced algorithm was compared to the conventional hill climbing MPPT technique according to various criteria, showing the disadvantages and advantages of each. Experimental results show advantage of the enhanced algorithm compared to the conventional hill climbing MPPT technique in time response attenuation (0.25 s versus 0.6 s), little oscillations (0.5 W versus 2.5 W), power loss reductions and better maximum power point tracking accuracy (98.45 W versus 92.75 W) of the enhanced algorithm compared to the conventional hill climbing MPPT technique.