An advance geometrical maximum power point targeting technique for solar photovoltaics using current-voltage curve

The perturb-and-observe and the incremental conductance methods are well-known algorithms for extracting maximum output power from a solar photovoltaic array. Their performance is not satisfactory in steady-state conditions as well as when the solar irradiance and temperature change rapidly. Direct maximum power point search methods are also available such as bisection, false position, secant and Newton-Raphson techniques. But they require large number of iterations. This paper proposes a non-iterative and direct MPP search method based on the geometry of a current-voltage (I-V) characteristic. The unique feature of the method is that it finds the MPP by solving a combination of three linear equations relating I and V as well as the quadratic regression analysis. The validity of the method is examined by employing it for several cells´ as well as a silicon module´s I-V data previously available in the literature and for a silicon module tested in the laboratory. For all cases, the method finds the highly accurate MPP parameters. The error analysis shows that it can easily handle the noisy measured data as well. The results obtained from the analysis show that the proposed method can easily be adopted for MPP tracking for all kinds of PV technologies.