A Newton-Based Extremum Seeking MPPT Method for Photovoltaic Systems with Stochastic Perturbations

Microcontroller based maximum power point tracking (MPPT) has been the most popular MPPT approach in photovoltaic systems due to its high flexibility and efficiency in different photovoltaic systems. It is well known that PV systems typically operate under a range of uncertain environmental parameters and disturbances, which implies that MPPT controllers generally suffer from some unknown stochastic perturbations. To address this issue, a novel Newton-based stochastic extremum seeking MPPT method is proposed. Treating stochastic perturbations as excitation signals, the proposed MPPT controller has a good tolerance of stochastic perturbations in nature. Different from conventional gradient-based extremum seeking MPPT algorithm, the convergence rate of the proposed controller can be totally user-assignable rather than determined by unknown power map. The stability and convergence of the proposed controller are rigorously proved. We further discuss the effects of partial shading and PV module ageing on the proposed controller. Numerical simulations and experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed MPPT algorithm.