An incremental conductance method with variable step size for MPPT: Design and implementation

In this paper the authors propose a novel method for tracking the maximum power point of a PV array. This method is derived by the well known incremental conductance method and the novelty consists in varying the duty cycle of the DC-DC switching converter used as MPPT tracker using a variable step size instead of a fixed step size. A practical way to determine the minimum and the maximum values of the variable step size is explained in detail. The laboratory results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method both in terms of speed in MPP tracking and accuracy in the MPP individuation.