The power demand in industrial, residential, and
commercial sectors has been growing rapidly recently. As
a result, finding an inexpensive, environmentally friendly,
and renewable energy source has been a hot topic for some
time [1-3]. Currently, the solar energy, is one of the most
promising renewable sources harnessed by humans [1, 4-8].
However, solar energy systems still suffer from low
efficiencies and high cost[9]. Harvesting the maximum
possible power from each solar array can increase the
efficiency and reduce the cost per watt of the solar
electricity. The Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT)
algorithms in Photovoltaic (PV) systems are responsible for
maximizing the power generated by a solar array.
Several MPPT algorithms have been proposed in the
literature [5, 10-16] throughout the last decade. Each
method has its own set of advantageous and
disadvantageous. Several papers have compared different
MPPT techniques [17] from many aspects such as ease of
implementation, cost, and convergence performance.
However, not many scholars have looked into the problem
of dynamic response of MPPT algorithms to dynamical
environmental conditions such as sudden temperature or
irradiation variations.
The purpose of this paper is to implement and
experimentally compare four well-known MPPT algorithms
in terms of their response to environmental condition
variations. When comparing the four methods, to perform a
fair comparison, all of the implementation parameters such
as the sampling time, voltage step, etc. are set to the same
values. It is worth mentioning that the four algorithms
perform very well on the paper and in simulations, however,
the goal here has been to compare them in actual
experimental system to gain a real understanding of the
merits of each algorithm.
The reminder of the paper is organized as follows: In
section II, the experimental system setup is introduced.
Section III introduces the four MPPT algorithms under
study. Section IV explains the experiments setup while
Section V provides the results and a brief analytical and
qualitative comparison of the four methods based on the
provided results. Section VI concludes the paper.