Research and simulation on photovoltaic power system maximum power control

Photovoltaic power generation system implements an effective utilization of solar energy, but generally has very low conversion efficiency. Maximum power point tracker (MPPT) control is essential to ensure the output of photovoltaic power generation system at the maximum power output as possible. Photovoltaic cells model of photovoltaic power generation system and basic control algorithm is discussed in this paper. MPPT control based on perturbation & observation (P&O) method and incremental conductance (IncCond) method is respectively simulated in Matlab/Simulink. The simulation analysis shows that P&O method is simple, but has considerable power loss. IncCond method has more precise control and faster response, but has correspondingly higher hardware requirement. In practice, in order to achieve maximum efficiency of photovoltaic power generation, a reasonable and economical control methods should be chosen.