Implementation of MPPT for PV Isolated System by P&O, I_C and PSO Methods based on Arduino Technology

Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithms are very important for the PV systems because they attract the points of maximum power at any conditions of the varying temperature and irradiation and subsequently decrease the PV array cost. This paper presents an improved MPPT technique for the PV system using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm comparing with the conventional MPPT methods using perturb and observe (P&O) and incremental conductance (I_C).  MATLAB simulations are carried out under the same irradiation and temperature and a variation in the load and comparing the performance of the three methods. In Protues 8.3 professional software, a design of the proposed model using Arduino UNO of the three algorithms is achieved. One of the important contributions of this paper is the proposed experimental work which is carried out by the combination of Arduino UNO which is coded by C language and coupled with MATLAB results which obtained by the simulation for the used different optimization methods in this paper. At the end of this paper, there is a comparison in tabular form between the presented 3 optimization methods with their experimental results. It is found that the results obtained by using PSO are more acceptable.

The main advantages of the PSO are as follows: - it reduces the oscillations at the steady state (to approximately zero) once the MPP is located, and its algorithm is very fast comparing to the other two methods.