Maximum Power Point Tracking Control of Photovoltaic Systems via Particle Swarm Optimization Considering Slow Changes

The output of photovoltaic (PV) systems is sensitive to environmental changes such as solar radiation and panel temperature. In addition, when PV cells are partially shaded, the power consumption characteristics become multimodal. To obtain the maximum power adaptively according to such operating conditions, particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control methods have been proposed so far. However, these conventional methods still cannot cope with monotonically small changes of operating conditions. In this paper, a PSO-based MPPT control method that can resolve this problem is proposed by introducing appropriate conditions and methods in the algorithm. In simulation, the proposed method is compared with several existing methods to illustrate its effectiveness.