Implementation of MPPT for Flexible Solar Cells embedded on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT)method for a flexible organic polymer solar cell (FOPSC) under varying shading condition. FOPSC was fabricated using a composite of three conjugated polymers namely PFO, PEO-at-co-MEH-PPV, and MEH-PPV as active layer, CNT/rGO composite as counter electrode (CE), substrate made of Poly-Ethylene Terephthalate (PET). The fabricated OPSC showed around 0.69 as fill factor (FF), a 0.67 V of voltage at open circuit condition(Voc), a 6.37% of power conversion efficiency (PCE, η) of and a 13.69 mA/cm
²
as its current density (J
_sc
) at short circuit condition. The PCE of OPSC was comparable to that of OPSC with Pt CE (η =7.82%).Four OPSC strips where connected in series, aground-based UAV model and different shading conditions were recreated and the power to voltage relationships were obtained. Based on the experimental data obtained, a MPPT techniques was developed using second order derivative of output voltage with respect to duty cycle ratio (D2VOC). The buck boost converter (BBC) with a PWM controlled using a microcontroller was utilized to implement the D2VOC based MPPT.