MPPT control of PV array based on PSO and adaptive controller

Abstract

In general, photovoltaic (PV) array is not able to generate maximum power automatically, because some partial shading caused by trees, clouds, or buildings. Irradiation imperfections received by the PV array are overcome by applying maximum power point tracking (MPPT) to the output of the PV array. In order to overcome these partial shading problems, this system is employing particle swarm optimization (PSO) as MPPT method. It optimizes the output power of the solar PV array by Zeta converter. Output voltage of MPPT has high rate such that it needs stepdown device to regulate certain voltage. Constant voltage will be the input voltage of buck converter and controlled using adaptive PID. Adaptive control based on model reference adaptive control (MRAC) has design that almost same as the conventional PID structure and it has better performance in several conditions. The proposed system is expected to have stable output and able to perfectly emulate the response of the reference model. From the simulation results, it appears that PSO have high tracking accuracy and high tracking speed to reach maximum power of PV array. In the output voltage regulation, adaptive control does not have a stable error status and consistently follows the set point value.