A Reduced Search Space Exploration Metaheuristic Algorithm for MPPT

The necessity for clean and sustainable energy has shifted the energy sector’s interest in renewable energy sources. Photovoltaics (PV) is the most popular renewable energy source because the sun is ubiquitous. However, PV’s power transfer efficiency varies with different load’s electrical characteristics, temperatures on PV panels, and insolation conditions. Based on these factors, Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) is a mechanism formulated as an optimization problem adjusting the PV to deliver the maximum power to the load. Under full insolation conditions, varying solar panel temperatures, and different loads MPPT problem is a convex optimization problem. However, when the PV’s surface is partially shaded, multiple power peaks are created in the power versus voltage (P-V) curve making MPPT non-convex. Unfortunately, all optimization strategies for MPPT under partial shading applied in previous works, from traditional techniques to Machine Learning and the recently proposed Nature-inspired algorithms, were either computationally expensive or/and led to extensive power losses. To this end, this work presents an algorithm that builds upon metaheuristic optimization algorithms to reduce their complexity further and mitigate the power losses during power tracking. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm converges faster to maximum power point with lower power losses during tracking compared to two very recently proposed MPPT algorithms under partial shading conditions.