Maximum Power Point Tracking Based on Look Up Table Approach

Abstract

This work proposes a lookup table based approach to track the maximum power from a solar photovoltaic (PV) module. The performance of the solar PV module is greatly influenced by various environmental factors and it is therefore necessary to operate the PV module at its optimal point so as to ensure that maximum power is extracted from the PV source. Several fixed step and variable step maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this paper a simple and fast maximum power tracking method based on lookup table approach is proposed. The maximum power point voltages for various insolation levels are obtained from the experimental setup and are fed to the look up table. This look up table thus formulated can then provide the reference voltage for various insolation conditions without many computations. The performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the conventional MPPT methods like perturb and Observe (P&O), Incremental Conductance (INC) and Fuzzy logic (FLC) based MPPT. The simulation results show that the lookup table (LUT) approach tracks the maximum power point faster than the conventional algorithms under changing illumination conditions and reduces simulation time.