Development and Analysis of New and Modified Optimization Algorithms for Maximum PowerPoint Tracking in PV Systems under Partial Shaded Conditions

Abstract

The increased demand for electric energy due to the global population growth and industrialization followed by the fast-depleting conventional energy sources and environmental concerns have motivated the use of renewable energy sources. Among the various renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, tidal etc., photovoltaic (PV) power generation offers several advantages namely omnipresence and availability of solar light as fuel, near-zero maintenance cost, environment friendliness, long life of PV modules, absence of rotating parts etc. The exploitation of PV power to meet the increased power demand is taken up seriously in India also. To be precise, India ranks 4th position in terms of total installed capacity of solar power generation which accounts for about 64.38 GW as of February 2023. newlineIn spite of these advantages, PV power generations system suffers from huge initial investment and low conversion efficiency. In order to harvest maximum power generated by the PV arrays, maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is usually employed in PV systems in conjunction with power electronic interfaces namely dc-dc converter and/or inverter. The power-voltage (P-V) characteristic curve of a PV system exhibits a maximum power point (MPP) that varies nonlinearly with environmental conditions such as temperature and solar insolation and hence tracking MPP is a challenging task. newlineIn large PV installations, several PV modules are interconnected in series and/or parallel to cope up with desired voltage and current capacity. At times, due to moving clouds, shadows of trees, buildings and other neighbouring objects, some parts of the PV array receive non-uniform sunlight leading to partial shaded condition (PSC). The PV modules are equipped with bi-pass diodes under PSC to avoid hotspots and this results in multiple maxima in the P-V curve of the PV system. The presence of multiple peaks in the PV curve reduces the effectiveness of conventional MPPT techniques due to their inability to distinguish between the local and global peaks