Maximum power point tracking algorithms for photovoltaic applications: A comparative study

With the increased demand of energy, renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass and ocean are getting more attention as compared to conventional energy sources because of absence of fuel cost, lesser noise and low maintenance. Among the different renewable energy sources, photovoltaic generation is the most attractive research area during the past decades. Photovoltaic module results in the output power which keeps on changing with the environmental conditions. Thus, there is a need of control algorithms which can extract the maximum power from the photovoltaic modules irrespective of the environmental conditions such as temperature and irradiation. Numerous control algorithms have been proposed in the recent years. This paper presents a comparative study of various maximum power point tracking algorithms used for extracting maximum power from the photovoltaic modules.