Adaptive Incremental Conductance as a Highly Efficient Maximum Power Point Tracking Algorithm for Photovoltaic Systems under Partial Shading

The Maximum Power Tracking (MPPT) Incremental Conductance (IC) and Adaptive Incremental Conductance (AIC) algorithms are simulated and compared for different shading patterns on a typical Photovoltaic (PV) System. The results show that the conventional IC algorithm misses the Global Maximum Power Point (GMPP) and achieves a low dynamic MPPT efficiency around 83% for PV strings under different critical shading conditions. However, the AIC algorithm, with optimized parameters, successfully tracks the GMPP and its dynamic MPPT efficiency is above 99.3% under similar shading conditions. Then, it is concluded that the AIC is far superior to the conventional IC algorithm, and it has a good performance like other soft computing and bio-inspired methods, but it is simpler to implement than those algorithms.