Analysis of the performance of DC photovoltaic pumping systems with maximum power point tracking

Many algorithms for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) of photovoltaic (PV) systems have been proposed. However, the application of these algorithms to dc pumping systems is not well covered in the literature. In this paper, the performance of directly connected dc PV pumping systems is compared to that of systems using three different low cost MPPT algorithms, namely a constant voltage algorithm, a perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm, and an incremental conductance (INC) algorithm. Using MPPT, the load power increases reducing the PV array size and the overall cost of the system.