A skipping adaptive P&O MPPT for fast and efficient tracking under partial shading in PV arrays

This work presents a new Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) scheme which predicts the local peak positions precisely and tracks the global peak under partial shading effectively. In addition to that, a skipping mechanism is integrated into it, which helps the MPPT to avoid scanning several sections of the I-V or P-V curve. Consequently, the global peak tracking gets accurate and faster than existing MPPT techniques. Several rigorous experiments are carried out in Matlab/Simulink to verify the behaviour of the MPPT. It is observed that under deep shading where the global peak resides on the left zone in voltage profile, tracking speed gets significantly faster. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is implemented in hardware through buck-boost converter in conjunction with dSpace DS1104 board to justify the applicability. Tracking results under several partial shading shows that the proposed method outperforms other MPPT techniques namely Modified Incremental Conductance (MIC), Ant colony optimization-P&O (ACO-P&O) and Cuckoo Search (CS) by a significant margin. Tracking speed is improved by 2 to 3 times depending on the shading pattern and efficiency is well ensured over 99% under all cases