Design, Simulation and Voltage Control of Standalone Photovoltaic System Based MPPT: Application to a Pumping System

Abstract

This paper defines a circuit-based simulation model for a PV cell in order to allow estimating the electrical behaviour of the cell with respect changes on environmental parameter of temperature and irradiance. Maximum power point trackers (MPPT) play an important role in photovoltaic (PV) power systems because they maximize the power output from a PV system for a given set of conditions, and therefore maximize the array efficiency. DC/DC converters together with maximum power point tracking systems (MPPT) are used to avoid the energy losses. Different algorithms have been proposed for maximum power point tracking, the Perturb & Observe (P&O) and Incremental Conductance (incCond) methods are studied in this work. We present in this paper also the implementation of a photovoltaic model using Matlab/Simulink, which can be representative of PV cell module, for easy use on simulation platform. Taking the effect of sunlight irradiance and cell temperature into consideration, the output current and power characteristics of PV model are simulated and optimized using the proposed model. Next, a voltage control of a photovoltaic system is presented in order to have a constant voltage at the output, always keeping the system works at maximum power. Indeed, in most cases, the load must operate at a constant voltage. The simulation results are carried out using Matlab/Simulink.