Optimizing duty-cycle perturbation of P&O MPPT technique

Abstract

In presence of rapidly changing atmospheric conditions, the Perturb and Observe (P&O) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm can be confused due to the fact that it is not able to distinguish the variations of the photovoltaic array output power caused by the duty cycle modulation from those ones caused by the irradiance variation. In this paper, it is shown that the negative effects associated to such a drawback can be greatly reduced if the magnitude of the duty-cycle perturbations is customized to the dynamic behavior of the specific DC-DC converter adopted to realize the P&O MPPT. As an example, a boost battery charger has been studied.