Experimental investigations and comparison of various MPPT techniques for photovoltaic system

This paper deals with Matlab/Simulink and experimental investigations of various maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques namely incremental conductance (Inc), perturb and observation (P&O), constant voltage control (CVC) method, and introduction of a novel reference power (Pref) method for extracting the maximum power from the solar photovoltaic (PV) system. The complete system model along with these MPPT methods are developed in Matlab/Simulink and simulation results are obtained during sudden increase in irradiation of 1000 W/m², and verified experimentally. These MPPT methods are also implemented on Inverse-Sepic converter, which claims to extract maximum power from the PV system. Various experimental observations are taken to access the performance of these MPPT techniques such as settling time of the full load current under sudden exposure of irradiation level of 1000 W/m², performance during step increase in irradiation level (from 500 W/m² to 1000 W/m²) and vice versa. Extensive results are taken to compare these methods. The proposed Pref method is found to have lowest settling time to stabilize the load current as 520 ms, whereas, Inc method takes 1.24 s. Further, the efficiency of Inverse-Sepic converter with Pref method achieves the highest efficiency of 95.26%, whereas, it extracts lowest efficiency on same input as 90.77% with P&O method. The overall performance of the proposed Pref method is found to be superior as compared to other discussed MPPT methods as verified by experimental results.