PSO BASED MAXIMUM POWER POINT TRACKING OF PARTIALLY SHADED SOLAR ARRAY IN INTERLEAVED BOOST CONVERTERS

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Photovoltaic method of power generation is essentially important as they provide an alternative method of power generation. The solar array have a non linear voltage current characteristics where maximum power is reached. When the solar panel is partially shaded it is difficult to track the global maximum power. This paper defines a simulation circuit in MATLAB/SIMULINK for tracking of maximum power from solar panel under varying atmospheric condition and partially shaded condition. An interleaved boost converter is used which is the parallel connection of two boost converters with pulses 1800 phase shifted resulting in minimized ripple content compared to ordinary boost converter. . The maximum power varies with respect to temperature and solar radiation. MPPT algorithm is used to track the maximum power and thereby improving the efficiency of the system. By manipulating the duty cycle of the interleaved boost converter the system implements particle swarm optimization based MPPT algorithm. The particle swarm optimization is a randomly searching algorithm which generates duty cycle randomly to reach maximum power. The simulation was performed under various solar radiations and their waveforms are presented under normal operating condition and partially shaded condition.

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