Optimizing Step-Size of Perturb & Observe and Incremental Conductance MPPT Techniques Using PSO for Grid-Tied PV System

This paper presents the particle swarm optimization (PSO) to optimize the maximum PV output power and to determine the best design variable for penalizing the step size of the conventional methods namely the perturb and observe (PO) and the incremental conductance (IC). With the help of the hybrid MPPT algorithm (PSO+IC and PSO+PO), the step size is no longer fixed, and it is changing according to the solar irradiance. To evaluate the proposed hybrid algorithm, a single-stage grid connected PV system is designed for several different scenarios with various weather conditions. The performance of the hybrid MPPT algorithm and the conventional methods is compared. The results demonstrate that the hybrid MPPT algorithm is remarkably better than the conventional methods, especially for PSO+IC, where it only takes 43.4 ms of tracking time and reaches the efficiency of 99.07% under standard test condition by using Matlab/Simulink 2018a software .

Index Terms— Hybrid MPPT, particle swarm optimization, incremental conductance, perturb and observe, optimal step-size, single-stage grid connected PV system