Development of a dual-tracking technique for extracting maximum power from PV systems under rapidly changing environmental conditions

Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is the back bone of most photovoltaic (PV) systems. The MPPT technique helps in extracting the maximum power available from a PV panel under varying atmospheric and load conditions. As the environmental conditions fluctuate throughout the day, maximum power point tracker along with the power converter forces the PV panel to deliver maximum power to the load. Performance indices like speed of convergence, accuracy, steady state losses, implementation complexity, cost, etc. determine the overall suitability of a maximum power point tracking technique. Researchers have proposed different techniques to achieve fast and accurate tracking of the maximum power point (MPP). Among these techniques, hill-climbing based algorithms are widely used for commercial and industrial applications. In this paper, the authors have developed an efficient dual-tracking MPPT technique for rapidly changing atmospheric conditions. A comparative performance analysis of several conventional MPPT techniques and this dual-tracking technique has been carried out in Matlab/Simulink environment. Validation of the proposed technique has been done by comparing its energy yield with that of a recent single-tracking technique reported in literature under a typical one-day irradiance profile. The same irradiance profile has been used to show the economic gain of the technique. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.