Investigation and simulation of a solar water pumping system with a speed-controlled DC motor

An investigation on a photovoltaic (PV) water pumping system (PVWPS) based on a DC motor, under an imposed rotation speed and changeable weather conditions, has been done in this research work. Thus, to extract the maximum power point of the studied system, the Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm and Incremental Conductance (IC) strategy are applied. The investigation is conducted on a centrifugal pump driven by a DC motor with speed control by using the MATLAB/Simulink software. The simulation results from the designed PVWPS demonstrate that the IC strategy outperforms the P&O algorithm in convergence speed, while the P&O offers superior steady-state oscillation performance under high irradiation levels.