Improvement of convergence speed of particle swarm optimization algorithm: application to Maximum PowerPoint Tracking control of a photovoltaic generator

The photovoltaic system (PVS) studied in this article consists of a photovoltaic generator (PVG) supplying a battery through a buck converter. The objective of the work is to enhance the tracking convergence of the particle swarm algorithm in order to find the maximum power point of the photovoltaic generator. For this, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm suitable for our PVS is applied to the control of the DC-DC converter to track the maximum power point of the generator. The developed algorithm is simulated in Matlab-Simulink for uniform and dynamic irradiation and temperature on the PVG. The obtained results show that for an estimated MPPT control efficiency of at least 99.7 %, the improved PSO algorithm converges to near MPP with a smaller number of iterations than the PSO without improvement in all test cases.