Implementation of PV cell based standalone solar power system employing incremental conductance MPPT algorithm

The paper presented here proposes a Photovoltaic (PV) System consists of PV panel, Maximum Power Point tracker (MPPT) & DC-DC boost converter targeted for DC loads of a Stand-Alone Photovoltaic application. A circuit based simulation of Photovoltaic (PV) panel is proposed in order to analyse & estimate the electrical behaviour of the panel with respective change in environmental conditions like irradiation & temperature. The Photovoltaic (PV) panel characteristic which is achieved from Shockley diode equation is non linear in nature. Thus Maximum Power Point tracker is designed with the help of a new circuit based simulation of Incremental Conductance algorithm to extract maximum power from the panel. A DC-DC boost converter is designed to get constant DC voltage output from changing DC panel voltage and hence duty cycle of the converter is calculated accordingly. The proposed system is designed using MATLAB/Simulink and the results have been found to be satisfactory.