Maximum Power Point Tracking Improvement Using Model Reference Adaptive Control Scheme

Abstract

This paper presents maximum power point tracking improvement using model reference adaptive control (MRAC) scheme. Solar photovoltaic (PV) energy system remains one of the renewable energy applications which operate by tracking energy from the sun and converting it into useful electrical energy. However, harnessing the generated energy has been the major concern of the engineers hence the adoption of various control strategies for efficient control of the generated power. The idea is to transfer the optimal generated power to the output considering the fact that PV energy produced may have been affected by irradiation and temperature conditions. To avoid the unstable output power, there is need to deploy an efficient control scheme. Most of the conventional control techniques are not optimal to resolve power inaccuracies in the system and they have shortcomings. This work is therefore aimed at analyzing solar photovoltaic energy system using MRAC technique to investigate the control performance. The results obtained by simulation on MATLAB/Simulink software, show an average tracking efficiency of 73.41%, the rise time of 0.7093s and a duty cycle of 0.7. Moreover, MRAC operates at small gain values and the range at which MRAC can operate was found to be 0.1 < 𝛤 < 2.