DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ENHANCED PSO BASED MPPT FOR PV PRODUCTION UNDER PARTIAL SHADING CONDITIONS

The search for cleaner energy solutions is being encouraged by the increasing world's energy demand and the emerging environmental concerns. Renewable sources are free, clean and virtually limitless and for those reasons they present a great potential. Photovoltaic systems (PV) have low operation and maintenance costs and to increase the efficiency of a PV production, a Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithm is proposed based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The proposed PSO-based MPPT is able to avoid the oscillations around the maximum power point (MPP) and the convergence to a local maximum under partial shading conditions (PSC). Experimental and simulations tests were done to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results show that it exhibits an excellent tracking under rapid variation in environment conditions (irradiance), no oscillations once the MPP is found and it can avoid the convergence to local maxima.