Efficient Maximum Power Point Tracking for a Distributed PV System under Rapidly Changing Environmental Conditions

When conventional maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques are required to operate fast under rapidly changing environmental conditions, a large power loss can be caused by slow tracking speed, output power fluctuation, or additionally required ad hoc parameters. This paper proposes a fast and efficient MPPT technique that minimizes the power loss with the adaptively binary-weighted step (ABWS) followed by the monotonically decreased step (MDS) without causing output power fluctuation or requiring additional ad hoc parameter. The proposed MPPT system for a photovoltaic (PV) module is implemented by a boost converter with a microcontroller unit. The theoretical analysis and the simulation results show that the proposed MPPT provides fast and accurate tracking under rapidly changing environmental conditions. The experimental results based on a distributed PV system demonstrate that the proposed MPPT technique is superior to the conventional perturb and observe (P&O) technique, which reduces the tracking time and the overall power loss by up to 82.95%, 91.51% and 82.46%, 97.71% for two PV modules, respectively.