The Effect of Modeling Types Characterization for PV Power Source on Maximum Power Point Tracking

This paper deals with the problem of energy transfer maximization between a solar power source side and the load demand side. Owing to the multitude of mathematical models in the literature that claim to represent the behavior of the photovoltaic module, the work here is to throw light on the importance of choosing a proper mathematical model of the photovoltaic module for the above-mentioned context with the target of enlarging the energy yield from such a generator system irrespective changing environmental conditions. First, a comparison between four mathematical models based on a single-diode representation for photovoltaic generation source is presented. The objective of this analysis is to compute the errors between these models and the experimental data in predicting the maximum power point. Then an easy-to-implement tracking method for working on the maximum power point is assumed. The idea of this maximum power point tracking technique is to blend two conventional algorithms, namely incremental conductance and fractional open-circuit voltage, in such a way as to improve the starting period of the normal incremental conductance algorithm, so that fast and accurate convergence can be achieved. A comparison between the dynamic control performances of the studied four different kinds of the single-diode model under the maximum power condition is performed, and the impact of increasing the complexity of the single-diode model commonly utilized to represent photovoltaic cell/module under the energy transfer maximization constraint for autonomous generation applications is finally explored. The paper extends and complements our recently published results in the literature. (C) 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.