Performance of PSO Based Variants in Tracking Optimal Power in a Solar PV based Generation System under Partial Shading Condition

Abstract

Solar PV system has become one of the most important aspect for power generation due to the abundant supply of rays coming from the sun. But due to partial shading effects, the power at the output of a Solar array becomes limited. Hence, this paper has proposed a comparison among various available techniques for tracking maximum power at the output of the PV array. Different particle swarm optimization (PSO) based algorithms have been used to track the maximum power and the comparison is done on the basis of convergence rate for different shading patterns. The standard version of PSO was found to be the most effective way for tracking maximum power for most of the shading patterns. However, for very few cases other variants of PSO performed better.