Maximum power point tracking for photovoltaic system: Modified Perturb and Observe algorithm

In the past decades, there has been a huge growth in the use of the renewable energy sources. Photovoltaic energy is one of these sources but, the high cost and low conversion efficiency have limited the use of such endless energy source. Also the output power of a photovoltaic system (PV) is nonlinear and it is affected by weather conditions, therefore the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) was invented to extract the maximum power from each PV array. In this paper two methods are critically reviewed; Perturb & Observe method (P&O) and Incremental Conductance. A new technique of tracking the maximum power point based on P&O is introduced in this paper. In this technique, a new variable irradiation is added to the measured components to improve the overall performance of the P&O tracking mechanism.