Improvement of hill climbing method by introducing simple irradiance detection method

One of the common drawback of hill climbing method is the wrong direction of perturbation under sudden change of irradiance. Where, the MPPT controller has mistaken the sudden power increase or decrease is caused by step perturbs instead of irradiance level change. The MPPT controller will perturbs at least one step to wrong direction before getting back on correct direction to the tracking to maximum power point (MPP). This paper introduces a simple irradiance detection method to eliminate the wrong direction of perturbation. The proposed method is simple and does not require heavy processing algorithm so it could be applied on low cost control system. The performance of proposed method is compared with conventional hill climbing method and it is verified in experiment.