An experimental comparative study of perturb and observe and incremental conductance MPPT techniques for two-stage photovoltaic inverter

As society evolves, the pollution and demand for energy increase. The use of solar energy as power supply to attend the energy consumption prevents increase of pollution. Photovoltaic (PV) systems present non-linear characteristic of current-voltage and power-voltage. To maximize the efficiency, most PV systems use techniques to track the maximum power operating point. Literature presents techniques with different complexity and precision. The two most common methods are compared in this paper: Perturb and Observe and Incremental Conductance. These methods are applied to a two-stage PV inverter to find the maximum power point. Simulation results from PSIM software show that both methods follow the same pattern in system initialization and situations of environmental condition changing. Two different PV simulators are used in experimental setup, their results show that the Incremental Conductance method presents a better performance than the Perturb and Observe method.