Optimum solar energy harvesting system using artificial intelligence

Abstract

Renewable energy is promoted massively to overcome problems that fossil fuel power plants generate. One popular renewable energy type that offers easy installation is a photovoltaic (PV) system. However, the energy harvested through a PV system is not optimal because influenced by exposure to solar irradiance in the PV module, which is constantly changing caused by weather. The maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique was developed to maximize the energy potential harvested from the PV system. This paper presents the MPPT technique, which is operated on a new high-gain voltage DC/DC converter that has never been tested before for the MPPT technique in PV systems. Fuzzy logic (FL) was used to operate the MPPT technique on the converter. Conventional and adaptive perturb and observe (P&O) techniques based on variables step size were also used to operate the MPPT. The performance generated by the FL algorithm outperformed conventional and variable step-size P&O. It is evident that the oscillation caused by the FL algorithm is more petite than variables step-size and conventional P&O. Furthermore, FL's tracking speed algorithm for tracking MPP is twice as fast as conventional P&O.

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• fuzzy logic control
• maximum power point tracking (mppt)
• perturb and observe (p&o)
• variable step-size p&o