An Inductive Power Transfer Converter with Irradiance-Adaptive Hybrid MPPT Control Strategy for Floating-PV System

The market share of renewable energy grows rapidly with the rising issues like global warming and environment pollution. As a kind of flexible and mature way to collect solar energy, photovoltaic (PV) panels have been widely installed on lands. To save precious land resources, PV panels can be installed on water to form floating-PV farm. In this paper, an inductive power transfer (IPT) converter for wireless power transmission is proposed for the floating-PV system, which can avoid of possible electrical hazard and reduce the exposure of the components, thus enhance the performance of anti-humidity and anti-salinity of the floating-PV system. However, the varying irradiance conditions caused by changeable weather of lake or seashore scenario gives challenge to the trackable range of MPPT control strategy for the IPT converter. To address this problem, an irradiance-adaptive hybrid maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control strategy for the floating-PV system is also proposed, which can achieve the maximum power point (MPP) of the PV panels even under a wide range of irradiance conditions. In addition, the IPT converter with the proposed MPPT control strategy does not require a DC-DC converter to achieve the MPPT in a wide irradiance range, thus saving the system cost. Finally, the IPT converter with irradiance-adaptive hybrid MPPT control strategy is theoretically analyzed, and its feasibility is verified on an experiment platform.1