Optimized Maximum Power Point Tracker for fast changing environmental conditions

This work presents a high performance Maximum Power Point Tracker (MPPT) optimized for fast cloudy conditions, e.g. rapidly changing irradiation on the PV panels. The rapidly changing conditions are tracked by an optimized hill-climbing MPPT method, called dP-P&O. This algorithm separates the effects of the irradiation change from the effect of the trackerpsilas perturbation, and uses this information to optimize the tracking according to the irradiation change. The knowledge of the direction of the irradiance change enables the MPPT to use different, optimized tracking schemes for the different cases of increase, decrease or steady irradiance. This strategy leads to faster and better tracking when the irradiance is changing rapidly, and lower oscillations around the MPP in steady-state conditions. The simulations and experimental results show that the proposed dP-P&O MPPT provides a quick and accurate tracking even in very fast changing environmental conditions.