A fast and effective maximum power point tracking method under various weather conditions for grid-connected photovoltaic systems

Photovoltaic systems (PV) are exposed to various weather conditions during the day and getting the maximum power of a PV system is one of its major challenges. While the conventional methods take time to track the maximum power accompanying the fluctuation around the maximum power. Consequently, several metaheuristic algorithms have been presented to overcome the fluctuating around the maximum power. On the other hand optimization methods will search into entire the PV curve to extract the maximum power. This leads to unnecessary search points during the uniform shading conditions which decrease the convergence speed towards the maximum power. In overcoming the tracking time issues as well as the capacity to distinguish between uniform and partial shading conditions, a quick and efficient tracking technique connected to the grid system was presented in this paper. The proposed system, has been tested using MATLAB/SIMULINK, which includes a boost converter to track the maximum power with a sampling time of 0.05 seconds, While a voltage source converter (VSC) is used to transfer the power generated by solar panels to the grid. The simulation results demonstrated that the proposed method was successfully implemented, with an average tracking time of 0.412 s for different weather conditions. Moreover, the comparison with the conventional method of perturb and observe (P& O) has been presented to evaluate the proposed method’s efficiency.