Flower pollination global peak search algorithm for partially shaded solar photovoltaic system

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) systems are required to function at their maximum power point (MPP) to fully utilize solar energy. Solar PV panels are configured with maximum power point tracking (MPPT) systems to enhance the generation and supply of the maximum available power. However, owing to external environmental factors and partial shading conditions (PSCs), the tracking process becomes complex. Conventional MPPT methods cannot always achieve the global MPP. Thus, an advanced metaheuristic MPPT scheme for PV systems, the flower pollination algorithm (FPA), is implemented in this study to find the best global duty cycle to obtain the maximum power output, and a Levy flight is utilized to enhance FPA convergence. The FPA MPPT model was established, and its performance was compared with the conventional, and some meta-heuristic-based MPPT techniques; perturb and observe (PO), incremental conductance (INC), particle swarm optimization (PSO), cuckoo search (CS), grey wolf optimization (GWO), genetic algorithm (GA), double integral sliding mode control (DISMC), and hill-climbing (HC). Different scenarios were considered for the simulation: partial shading, complex partial shading, long-width, and long-length partial shading, and different temperature conditions employing series and series-parallel PV array configurations. In addition, real-world field atmospheric irradiance data for Daejeon city is used for the study. In terms of efficiency, the FPA attains at most 83%–96% of the expected GMP from the PV array as compared with the other MPPT techniques in all scenarios considered. The adopted FPA obtained the following root mean square error (RMSE), mean relative error (MRE), and mean absolute error (MAE) values respectively for each Scenario as follows: Scenario I: RMSE: 0.0061, MRE: 0.0463, MAE: 6.0745e-06, Scenario II: RMSE: 0.0116, MRE: 0.0430, MAE: 1.0738e-05, Scenario III: RMSE: 0.0640, MRE: 0.206, MAE: 4.8239e-05, Scenario IV (varying temperature conditions): RMSE: 0.0062–0.0074, MRE: 0.0460–0.0548, MAE: 6.1333e-06 – 7.4922e-06. A unique sensitivity performance comparison analysis is done employing the power spectral analysis to validate the effectiveness of the adopted FPA to the other MPPT techniques. The FPA performs better than all the techniques in all scenarios in comparing their maximum power tracked, convergence speed and accuracy, system efficiency, and optimum statistical results attained.