Maximum power point tracking of single-ended primary-inductor converter employing a novel optimisation technique for proportional-integral-derivative controller

This study presents an optimisation technique for proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to achieve maximum-power-point tracking (MPPT) of single-ended primary-inductor converter (SEPIC). A new weight function is developed to optimise the PID parameters based on gradient-descent (GD) method by adding low-pass filter term. The proposed optimisation method does not stick in the local minima, which happens frequently with the traditional weight function used in GD method, where the low-pass filter term suppresses the noise and smooths the iteration process. The prototype of the proposed optimised PID-based SEPIC converter for photovoltaic inverter applications is built using DSPbased TMS320F28335. The performance of the proposed optimised PID-based MPPT scheme is tested in both simulation and experiment at different operating conditions. A performance comparison of the proposed GD method with the conventional GD PID is also made in real-time. It is found that the proposed optimised PID-based SEPIC converter is superior to the conventional GD PID controller in terms of power transfer and efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed optimised PID controller for two-level inverter can achieve a better total harmonic distortion (THD) level as compared to the multi-level inverter frequently used by researchers for the same purpose.