Development of hybrid maximum power point tracking control algorithm for photovoltaic system

Renewable energy now-a-days is playing vital role in energy demand market and solar and wind are most wanted renewable energy resources to support the enormous power demand across the globe. Due to insufficient wind for more than half of the year, wind turbines are not capable of meeting the power demand. Hence, solar is treated as the main energy resource among all the renewable energy resources since sunlight is available almost all the days even though it is only available in day time. Solar system or photovoltaic (PV) system is capturing sunlight and converts it into electricity either for off-grid or in-grid applications. Amount of generation of electricity is purely depending upon the amount of sunlight captured by the PV panels and hence tracking of sunlight in order to capture maximum power is the main requirement in solar energy sector. In this paper, a novel hybrid maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm is presented and it has the combination of the features of perturb & observe algorithm and constant voltage algorithm. Proposed hybrid MPPT algorithm is applied to single phase residential and commercial solar inverters and the results have been captured. Both simulation and experimental results have been presented in this paper in order to validate the proposed algorithm. © 2015 World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society. All rights reserved.