Improvement of Solar Power from a Photovoltaic Array using Maximum Power Point Tracking Algorithm

Solar Energy harvesting is a process of collecting power from sun. There are many ways of collecting solar power. In this report we are going to use photovoltaic (PV) effect to collect the solar power. We have used a novel and efficient solar energy harvesting system with pulse width modulation (PWM) and maximum power point tracking (MPPT). In this report, we designed several models for solar energy harvesting system and simulate them in MATLAB/SIMULINK for solar powered DC-DC converters with PWM and MPPT to achieve maximum results. From the simulation results, it is shown that 88.52% efficiency using PWM control and 93.31% efficiency by using MPPT control for harvesting system. In simulation, as DC-DC converter, buck converter is used in this simulation. Perturbation and Observation (P&O) is used as the algorithm for MPPT control