A modified particle swarm optimization based maximum power point tracking for photovoltaic converter system

Abstract

This thesis presents a modified Particle Swarm Optimization based Maximum Power Point Tracking for Photovoltaic Converter system. All over the world, many governments are striving to exploit the vast potential of renewable energy to meet the growing energy requirements mainly when the price of oil is high. Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) is a method that ensures power generated in Photovoltaic (PV) systems is optimized under various conditions. Due to partial shading or change in irradiance and temperature conditions in PV, the power-voltage characteristics exhibit multiple local peaks; one such phenomenon is the global peak. These conditions make it very challenging for MPPT to locate the global maximum power point. Many MPPT algorithms have been proposed for this purpose. In this thesis, a modified Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO)-based MPPT method for PV systems is proposed. Unlike the conventional PSO-based MPPT methods, the proposed method accelerates convergence of the PSO algorithm by consistently decreasing weighting factor, cognitive and social parameters thus reducing the steps of iterations and improved the tracking response time. The advantage of the proposed method is that it requires fewer search steps (converges to the desired solution in a reasonable time) compared to other MPPT methods. It requires only the idea of series cells; thus, it is system independent. The control scheme was first created in MATLAB/Simulink and compared with other MPPT methods and then validated using hardware implementation. The TMS320F28335 eZDSP board was used for implementing the developed control algorithm. The results show good performance in terms of speed of convergence and also guaranteed convergence to global MPP with faster time response compared to the other MPPT methods under typical conditions (partial shading, change in irradiance and temperature, load profile). This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.