New design of the PV panel control system using FPGA-based MPSoC

Abstract The photovoltaic (PV) systems require parallel processing capabilities for tracking both sun and maximum power point (MPP). This paper presents a new approach of using the field programmable gate array (FPGA) as a multiprocessor system on a chip (MPSoC) to maximize the PV system performance. The FPGA based subsystem is used for controlling a single axis sun tracker and the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) using three soft-core processors. The sun tracking control scheme is based on a fuzzy logic control (FLC) algorithm guided by a set of time-based solar angle equations. The MPPT is employed using the variable step-size incremental conductance (INC) method. The main advantage of the proposed architecture is its ability to handle simultaneous tasks that require large memory size and floating point computations. Due to its flexibility the user can add more soft-cores to reduce the software complexity and increase the processing speed. The performance of a 50 W PV panel is tested experimentally and theoretically using the proposed tracking system. Results have shown graphically that the sun tracking achieves a small settling time with zero overshoot. Also, increasing the number of processors reduces the settling time of the sun tracking and MPPT. The combination increases the system output power with about 10.1%.