Investigation of Maximum Power Point Tracking of Different Kinds of Solar Panels Under Partial Shading Conditions

The cost of installing solar panels has been greatly reduced nowadays, so the advantages of solar energy are one of the reasons to energy transformation from coal-fired power to renewable energy. There are three materials of widely used modern solar panels: monocrystalline, polycrystalline, and amorphous. In this paper, we have constructed the one diode models (ODM) of these three different materials in order to find their I-V characteristic curves under uniform or partial shading conditions (PSCs). We have demonstrated that a maximum power point (MPP) tracker, under the same PSCs spends less time and has better tracking efficiency in tracking the MPP of a solar panel, made of amorphous material, because this type of solar panel has the lowest curvature value compared to the monocrystalline and the polycrystalline panels. Two different maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithms, such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and simulated annealing (SA), are used to validate this finding.