Optimizing Step-Size of Perturb & Observe and Incremental Conductance MPPT Techniques Using PSO for Grid-Tied PV System

A maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique plays an important role to ensure maximum photovoltaic (PV) output power is extracted under stochastic weather conditions. The research to date tends to focus on developing a standalone optimization MPPT algorithm rather than looking into a hybrid MPPT algorithm. This paper introduces particle swarm optimization (PSO) to optimize the maximum PV output power and to determine the best design variable for penalising the step size of the conventional methods namely the perturb and observe (PO) and the incremental conductance (IC). With the help of the hybrid MPPT algorithm (PSO+IC and PSO+PO), the step size is no longer fixed, and it is changing according to the…