Comparision of 'Perturb & Observe' and 'Incremental Conductance', Maximum Power Point Tracking algorithms on real environmental conditions

The trend and need of shifting towards renewable energy sources for electricity generation, has attracted researchers towards photovoltaic (PV) systems for last few decades. Since PV generator has nonlinear behavior, and its output power is a function of solar irradiance and ambient temperature, therefore need of developing maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques remains the interest. Among various MPPT techniques, Perturb & Observe (P&O) and Incremental-Conductance (IC) are dominant. This paper describes these two algorithms and compares them in terms of their computational complexity and oscillations near maximum power point (MPP) using MATLAB (R) & Simulink (R). Also testing conditions are based on the real environmental data collected at NED University, Karachi.