Geometrical prediction of maximum power point for photovoltaics

Abstract

It is important to drive solar photovoltaic (PV) system to its utmost capacity using maximum power point (MPP) tracking algorithms. This paper presents a direct MPP prediction method for a PV system considering the geometry of the I–V characteristic of a solar cell and a module. In the first step, known as parallelogram exploration (PGE), the MPP is determined from a parallelogram constructed using the open circuit (OC) and the short circuit (SC) points of the I–V characteristic and Lagrangian interpolation. In the second step, accurate values of voltage and power at the MPP, defined as Vmp and Pmp respectively, are decided by the Lagrangian interpolation formula, known as the Lagrangian interpolation exploration (LIE). Specifically, this method works with a few (V, I) data points instead most of the MPP algorithms work with (P, V) data points. The performance of the method is examined by several PV technologies including silicon, copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), copper zinc tin sulphide selenide (CZTSSe), organic, dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) and organic tandem cells’ data previously reported in literatures. The effectiveness of the method is tested experimentally for a few silicon cells’ I–V characteristics considering variation in the light intensity and the temperature. At last, the method is also employed for a 10W silicon module tested in the field. To testify the preciseness of the method, an absolute value of the derivative of power (P) with respect to voltage (V) defined as (dP/dV) is evaluated and plotted against V. The method estimates the MPP parameters with high accuracy for any kind of PV technologies with different environmental conditions. In future, this method proposes a guide line to construct control scheme for real-time MPPT tracking in the PV system.