Design and validation of a hybrid MPPT algorithm for PVS using an interleaved boost converter

Photovoltaic systems must be highly efficient to transfer the electric power generated to the local loads or to the electrical grid. In partial-shading conditions there are multiple local maximum power points which are not evaluated by conventional MPPT methods producing low efficiency in the photovoltaic system. In this paper a hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based method is proposed. The proposed method allows to locate the global maximum power point enhancing the availability of the generated electrical power and reducing the convergence time compared to the conventional PSO algorithm. The proposed method is compared with classical MPPT algorithms like Hill Climbing (HC), perturb and observe (P and O), incremental conductance (IncCond) and the conventional particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. The comparison is performed by means of numerical simulations and implementing an experimental platform with real photovoltaic panels.