Improved solar system with maximum power point tracking

This study presents an improved solar system with maximum power point tracking (MPPT). A digital signal processor is used to control the converter with the proposed control; thus, the system can implement MPPT independently for each solar panel whether it is under shading, various irradiation conditions or with faulty solar cells. A modified MPPT method is designed to reduce the power oscillation significantly, thus the power loss is reduced. With the proposed scheme, most of the solar panel available output power is delivered to the load only through a diode, reducing the converter power loss. In addition, the converter only handles part of the solar panel output power. Therefore, the system cost is reduced due to the low-power rating converter. A laboratory prototype is constructed and tested to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The proposed photovoltaic (PV) system and the PV balancer are compared through simulations and experiments under various shading conditions. The experimental results show that the proposed PV system can produce more output power with high efficiency.