Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization of a Photovoltaic System under Partial Shading

The solar photovoltaic (PV) energy is the most prevalent and popular source of energy. But the PV output characteristics are mainly depending on temperature and irradiance and are nonlinear in nature. Therefore, PV array characteristics greatly vary with change in the atmospheric condition. Under partial shading condition (PSC), PV modules will not receive the same level of incident solar irradiance throughout the system due to some obstructions such as: dust, cloudy weather, shadows of nearby objects: buildings, trees, mountains, birds etc… which causes mismatch in PV module characteristics of the PV array and losses arise in the entire PV configuration. Consequently, power extraction from the PV system is reduced and the PSC on the PV array can be minimized by the proper selection of PV configurations, physical relocation of the PV modules and maximum power point tracking techniques (MPPT) to overcome this problem. The present article studies and compares the MPPT based on the Adaptive particle swarm optimization (APSO) algorithm under partial and completely shaded. The perturbation and observation (P&O) method is widely due to its simplicity and easy implementation but the Intelligent and hybrid control such as: fuzzy logic control (FLC) and adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) can track the MPP with better efficiency but in a long time compared to conventional approaches. In addition, these methods need big data for good results and the data problem is regulated with the evolutionary algorithms and searching the duty cycle (d) in a shorter time than FLC and ANFIS. The principle of PSO, grey wolf optimization (GWO), and APSO techniques is the search for a global solution, and it have good behaviour under PSC but APSO can be classified as best solution between the studied approaches. The simulation results, which are presented in MATLAB/Simulink software, show the effectiveness of the proposed APSO technique.