Maximum Power Point Tracking Using Model Predictive Control of a Flyback Converter For Photovoltaic Applications

paper ID: 118

Paper Information

Presented at PECI 2014

Entry on IEEE Xplore

Authors

  • Mohammad Shadmand - Graduate Student at Texas A&M University

  • Robert S. Balog - Professor at Texas A&M University

  • Haitham Abu-Rub - Professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar

Abstract

The Photovoltaic (PV) array can feed power to the load through a DC/DC converter boosting the output voltage. Due to stochastic behavior of solar energy, Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) of PV arrays is required to operate at maximum power point. This paper presents MPPT of PV systems by means of Model Predictive Control (MPC) techniques. Extracting the maximum power from PV systems has been widely investigated within the literature. The main contribution of this paper is improvement of the Perturb and Observe (P&O) method through a fixed step predictive control under measured fast solar radiation variation. The proposed predictive control to achieve Maximum Power Point (MPP) speeds up the control loop since it predicts error before the switching signal is applied to the flyback DC/DC converter. Comparing the developed technique to the conventional P&O method indicates significant improvement in PV system performance. Experimental validation is presented using the dSpace CP 1103 to implement the MPC-MPPT for a flyback converter.

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