A comparative study of four widely-adopted MPPT techniques for PV power systems

This paper investigates and compares four different maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithms that are commonly used to improve the efficiency in photovoltaic (PV) systems. These studied algorithms are: the Perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm, the incremental conductance (IC) algorithm, the fuzzy logic (FL) control and the sliding mode control (SMC). The comparison is based on several performance criteria: settling time, tracking accuracy, implementation complexity and efficiency. Each MPPT algorithm is tested under various irradiation conditions using Matlab/Simulink. The comparative analysis shows that the SMC method is considered as the fastest and the most stable in MPP tracking as compared to the other studied methods except the presence of the chattering phenomena which is its major drawback.