Optimized Global Maximum Power Point Tracking of Photovoltaic Systems Based on Rectangular Power Comparison

Global maximum power point tracking (GMPPT) refers to the extraction of the maximum power from photovoltaic (PV) modules in real time under changing ambient conditions. Due to the installation of PV systems in densely built-up areas, partial shading scenarios are commonplace. Commercially established GMPPTs suffer from low tracking speeds and inefficiency. A novel GMPPT algorithm is proposed here based on the rectangular power comparison (RPC), which exploits the fundamental relationship between the shading factor, the bypass diode voltage and the global maximum power point. The entire theoretical formulation of RPC is presented systematically for the first time. This method boasts of increased conversion speeds owing to the precomputation of the module voltage versus the shading factor correlations using the regression of diode model from the experimentally obtained bypass diode characteristics. The proposed method is simple to implement with the computational complexity of order n, which represents the number of uniquely shaded PV modules in a series string. The proposed approach addresses the much-needed intersection problem between the distributed and centralized PV systems and therefore targets PV strings which are most common in residential and small to medium scale commercial PV installations world over. The proposed approach is validated with the in-house developed prototype hardware set-up and software control implementation giving a 99% tracking efficiency with a recorded tracking time of 10 ms. The experimental results show 50 times improvement in speed and 95% increase in power gain as compared to the other popular existing methods namely scanning based GMPPT and local MPPT methods respectively, with negligible computational burden and less than 0.5% added cost to the conventional PV energy conversion system.