Advanced Control Techniques for PV Maximum Power Point Tracking

The Photovoltaic (PV) power has rapid growth due to it is clean, no noise and little maintenance. However, all PV systems have two major drawbacks, i.e. the efficiency of PV power generation is very low and the output power of a PV system is nonlinear, which depends closely on weather conditions, such as ambient temperature and the solar irradiance. Hence, tracking the maximum power of the PV arrays at real time is very important to increase the whole system performance. In the past decades, there are a large number of maximum power point tracking (MPPT) methods have been proposed for PV system, such as constant voltage tracking (CVT) method, perturbation and observation (P&O) method, incremental conductance (INC) method, curve-fitting method, look-up table method, and so on. Actually, these conventional methods can track the maximum power point (MPP). But these methods have some drawbacks, like oscillation, miscalculation, poor accuracy, unimodal P–U curves only. To overcome the limitation of these methods, some advanced MPPT methods are introduced in this chapter. The experiment and simulation investigation demonstrate the excellent performance of the new method.