DESIGN OF MAXIMUM POWER POINT TRACKING TECHNIQUES FOR A STAND-ALONE PV SYSTEM

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and comparative study of maximum power point tracking techniques for stand-alone PV system. The comparison considers the performance of each technique in terms of settling time, maximum overshoot, tracking speed and tracking accuracy. The used battery requires as input a constant DC voltage input. For the purpose, the PI controller is used to obtain a constant DC voltage from boost converter in spite of changes in weather conditions. The parameters of PI controller are tuned by evolutionary techniques including different versions of particle swarm optimization and cuckoo search algorithm. Based on Simulink/Matlab simulations, it is found that best results, including total harmonic distortion, are obtained using fuzzy logic for maximum power point tracking, combined with PI battery charging controller tuned with modified adaptive acceleration coefficient particle swarm optimization.