Design and Performance Analysis of Photovoltaic Powered DC Motor Drive under Non-uniform Insolation Conditions

This manuscript presents a novel control strategy for photovoltaic (PV) driven DC motor application to improve the performance under changing insolation conditions. The PV array exhibits different current- voltage- (I-V) and power-current (P-V) characteristics under changing insolation conditions. Therefore, the DC motor experiences multiple fluctuations at the input side of the motor which lead to fluctuations in torque, increase the heating on the windings and reduce the life of the motor. Various maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques are available in the literatures, but they are ineffective in tracking the maximum power points in all the circumstances including partial shading conditions. Hence, to reduce the fluctuations and achieve stable operation of DC motor, a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) based MPPT technique is proposed in this paper. The PSO MPPT algorithm able to track the global maximum power point of PV array under partial shaded conditions and control the speed of DC motor. The proposed system is designed and modelled using MATLAB tool. A fair performance comparison is made between conventional perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT algorithm and PSO based MPPT algorithm.