Dithering digital ripple correlation control with digitally-assisted windowed sensing for solar photovoltaic MPPT

This work demonstrates the use of windowed current and voltage measurements for high accuracy PV maximum power point tracking using dithering digital ripple correlation control (DDRCC) at voltage and current levels typical of PV panels. Prior work has demonstrated that DDRCC can be used to obtain high tracking accuracy at fast speeds in low-power applications, however the measurement resolution required for DDRCC is non-trivial at typical panel power levels. In this work a circuit configuration is demonstrated which allows high resolution measurements using a basic microcontroller and analog circuitry. Using this technique, we experimentally demonstrate a 3.5X reduction in tracking error compared to conventional perturb and observe on the same hardware.