ABSTRACT
With the fast-growing demand for electricity, renewable energy sources are considered as alternative energy sources that can meet the demand with due concern over environmental pollution, global warming, and depletion of ozone layer caused by greenhouse effect. Solar energy is becoming more and more attractive especially because of its safe, reliable, maintenance-free, and environmentally friendly nature of power. However, besides its advantage of safe and eco-friendly nature, the energy produced by a PV module depends greatly on PV materials and solar insolation. To obtain the maximum power from PV panel, various Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) tracking methods are employed. This chapter investigates the various MPPT methods employed such as incremental conductance, perturb and observe, load current maximization, hill climbing, fuzzy logic controller, and hybrid methods. A PV string is modeled with MATLAB/Simulink and various MPPT methods are tested with the modeled PV string under fully radiation and partially shaded conditions. Simulation results shows that some algorithms are found to be best suited for fully radiation condition and some algorithms for partial shaded conditions.
