Optimized Sinusoidal Seeking Control for MPPT Controller Based PSO

Abbas Hussien Miry*, Ali Hussien Mary**

*Almustansiriyah University, **University of Baghdad,
Iraq ( e-mail: abbasmiry83@uomustansiriyah.edu.iq).
Iraq (e-mail: alimary76@ kecbu.uobabghada.edu.iq).

Abstract: The maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controller is used to trace the power point, so that
the output power produced by the photovoltaic (PV) system will be enhanced to a certain maximum
level. One of efficient MPPT controls is Extremum-Seeking Control (ESC) which is a nonlinear
controller and based on low pass and high pass filters, the design of the ESC parameters is a tuning
process. In this paper the optimization tool is used for tuning the extremum seeking control parameters to
obtain the maximum power from an array of solar cell to obtain high efficiency. Particle Swarm
Optimization (PSO) is used as an optimization method with a suitable objective function that makes the
error between ideal power and output of solar cell as minimize as possible. Simulation result performed
on both methods with different cases of irradiance using Simulink /Matlab and the results shows that
optimized extremum seeking control has faster convergence comparing with extremum seeking control.

Keywords: photovoltaic, PSO, MPPT, ESC, Optimization.

.  

1. INTRODUCTION 2. MODELLING OF PV

Photovoltaic system (PV) is increasingly being used due to The photovoltaic generator is formed by a series or
their safe sources of energy and economically sustainable parallel connection of ceil, a cell considers the basic
performance, the energy generated by photovoltaic element of photovoltaic array, therefore the study can be
modules is based on environmental factors, this is solar limited to a single cell model. The PV cell is represented
radiation. These factors affect both the voltage power and in Figure 2 by electrical equivalent circuit, which consists
the voltage current characteristics of the PV system and of the current source, cell losses are modelled by two
thus the load dependent. Solar energy is a good choice to resistors, shunt resistors (Youssef et al.2017).
generate the electrical energy due to its converted straight
to power using photovoltaic solar modules. The PV system
works with low maintenance and pollution-free. The
desired voltage, current and power can be generated by
connecting the PV modules in a parallel and series. In
order to reduce the environmental changes impact, MPPT
is required to optimize the power that can be obtained
(Munasala and Padmavathi ,2017).Recently, some
techniques are introduced to reach and follow the MPPT. Fig. 1. Equivalent circuit for Photovoltaic solar cell
One of those techniques is the Perturb and Observe.
It assumes that the controller adjusts the output voltage by The equations of I-V properties of PV cells are described
the constant amount with a measure of the power, if it as bellow (Azzouzi,2013).
increases, then more Increase in the same direction until
the power no longer increases. This type is very simple
and avoids the complexity. However, the result of these
I  I ph  I D  I sh (1)
controllers introduced oscillations in the output power,  q (VnKT
 IRs )
 V  IRs
resulting in a controller that always swings around the I  I ph  I 0  e  1  (2)
MPP. Another MPP method is Incremental conductance   Rs
(Putri et al.2015) it measures the ever-increasing changes in the photocurrent is linearly proportional to temperature as
the photoelectric current and voltage to estimate the shown in (3) .
voltage changes effect. This method produces better
results than the Perturb and Observe but requires more I ph  I ph(T1 ) (1  K (T  T1 ) (3)
calculations to control (Darab et al.2017). Where K is defined as bellow:
(Youssef et al.2017) use ESC is as MPPT controller under I SC(T2 )  I SC(T 1)
partial shading conditions with different parameters value K (4)
of filters. Our work try to design optimal ESC control T2  T1
based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO).
 As it can be seen from (4), I ph(T1 ) is directly proportional Since the efficiency of the power unit is lower it would be
advantageous to operate at peak power point so that the
to irradiance G (W/m2)( Heidari ,2016). power supply of the unit can be maximized. So the
I SC(T1 norm) maximization of power improves the use and reliability of
I ph(T1 )  G * (5) photovoltaic solar module. The MPPT tracking technique
Gnorm is used to obtain the maximum power point from the solar
PV module and transfer the power to the load through DC
I 0 is related to temperature as: to DC converter that is used for the purpose of maximizing
3 the power transfer of solar PV module utility. MPPT is
qVg 1 1
 T n (  )
used to ensure that the power output plate is always
I 0  I 0(T1 ) *   * e nk T T1 (6) occurred at maximum power Point. Using MPPT
 T1  dramatically increases the output power of the solar plant
I sc(T ) (Kushwaha et al.2016 , Yau and Wu.2013).
I 0(T1 )  qVOC (T 1 (7)
1

e nKT1
1
Where:
I: output current of solar cell
Iph : source current
Ish: shunt resistor current
ID: diode current
Io: diode reverse current
q: electron charge
V: solar cell voltage
Rs: series solar cell resistance
K: constant of Boltzmann
T: value of temperature
Rsh: shunt resistance
G:sun irradiance

From the previous equation, it noted that, the phototoxic

module is depended on solar irradiance, tempuras and input
voltage. Fig(2-3) show this fact.
Fig. 3. V-P Characteristics of solar cell at different value
of Irradiances

4. EXTERMUM SEEKING CONTROL PRINCPIBLE

Extremum Seeking Control (ESC) is an almost

automatic self-control strategy in the form that can search
for an unknown variable parameter inputs optimized with
respect to a specific performance index for the nonlinear
plant process. MPPT is realized by leading the gradient
obtained by closing the search loop with integration (Lei et
al.2010). In ESC a small disturbance signal injection asin
(t) with a related high frequency to predict the optimal
input voltage (V*) which shown in Fig. 4.
P* V*

P(V)
Fig 2. V-I Characteristics of solar cell at different value
of Irradiances
K
3.MPPT ALGOIRTHM HPF × LPF S
+

From previous section it noted, the output power of

solar cell change according to change of sun’s location and
direction. In the power-versus-voltage curve of the solar sin(wt)
cell there is single maxima obtained from the power that
corresponds to a certain value of current and voltage. Fig. 4. Block Diagram of ESC
Photovoltaic power will contain a sinusoidal component of The import part of building a PSO algorithm is to choice
the frequency equal to the dither signal which extracted in fitness functions. In our work, the fitness function is
HPF stage. The phase of sinusoidal signal is either equal to required to find the best filter parameters for the ESC
phase of dither signal when the voltage is lower than controller as shown in fig.6.
VMPP or different phase if voltage is greater than VMPP
as shown in fig.5.
s b c
Ppv sa sb Ipv
× s +

sin(wt)
Fig. 6. Block Diagram of OPESC

all particles in the population are passed to the fitness

Fig. 5. Sinusoidal ESC principle
The resulted signal is multiplied with dither signal to shift
the sinusoid above or below the DC component according
to phase. The DC component that is obtained by LPF
represents a signal that corresponds to the PV power
gradient. It is integrated and multiplexed by a graded
incremental gain (K) so that the output signal
asymptotically approaches the maximum point. Generally
the design of the ESC parameters is a tuning process
because the non-linear objective function is unknown
(Elnosh at al.2014).
function. The particles are then assessed and assigned a
number to represent their fitness. The larger figure was the
better fit. PSO uses the particle fitness value to generate a
new group that contains the best members. Each particle
represents the a,b,c term. a,b,c are used to build the ESC
filter parameters .Fig.7 shows the flow chart of OPESC.
The optimization problem becomes as follows: it is
required to find ESC parameters [a b c], that minimize the
objective function E(a,b,c) according to the equation
below:
Objective function   Pideal  Poutput (10)
6. SIMULATION RESULTS

5. OPTIMIZIED EXTERMUM SEEKING CONTROL In this section, the proposed method OPESC is compared
(OPESC) DESIGN with standard extemum seeking control ESC and
controllers are applied to array of PV system using
PSO is belong to artificial intelligent and especially Simulink/Matlab 2014 as shown in fig.8-10.The output of
to flocking birds and fish school .Collective intelligence OPESC block consider as input to boost DC-DC convertor
principle of PSO search as other artificial intelligence Model of PV module based on the data sheet of module.
.PSO particles reacting locally and globally with their This model has input current suitable for series. The
environment leading to the optimal solution of problem. characteristics of cell are listed in Table.1. The maximum
The main idea of PSO is to simulate common behaviour power for six PV modules equal to 510 watt.
occurs between fish school or bird flocks (Al-Faiz et
al.2012). The velocity and position can be modified for all Table .1 Characteristics of solar cell
particles through the current velocity and the distance from
optimal particle. The updated position and velocity for all
Power rated 85 Watt
particles can be archived by using the velocity and space
from Pbest to gbest as shown below: Maximum power 85 Watt
Maximum voltage of Modula 600 Volt
vpi( j 1)  v * vpi( j )  pc1.rd ( ).( pbest  psi( j ) )
(8) Voltage of max power 17.2 Volt
 pc2.rd ( ).( gbest  psi( j ) )
current of max power 4.95 Ampere
psi( j 1)  psi( j )  vpi( j 1) (9)
VO.C 22.2 Volt
i =1,.,….n
j is an number of particle, j is a number of iteration , ps is IS.C 5.45 Ampere
the filter parameter , vp is a motion vector, pbest is a
personal best for particle i , gbest is a global best for all
particles , v is weight parameters,k1 and k2 are two
positive constants, rd ( ) is a [0,1] random number.
 Start OPESC

Initialize the value of position and velocity for the particles [a ,b ,c]
No. of particles =20

Evaluate the value of error objective function for each particles eq.10

Initialize Local best fitness =current particle fitness

Local best particle =current particle position ,Iteration index=0

Initialize Global best particle = particle position for minimum objective function

Update the value of velocity and position according to eq.8 and eq.9

Increase Iteration index Evaluate the value of error objective function for updated particles eq.10

No

Stopping No current fitness

value
Met
< Local fitness

Yes
Yes

Update Local fitness = current fitness value

No current fitness
value
< Global fitness

Yes

Update Global fitness = current fitness

value

End

Fig. 7. Flow chart for OPESC Method

 Fig. 8. Array of PV Modula

Fig. 9. PV Modula for first array

 Fig. 10. Single PV Modula

simulation results show that ,OPESC carefully tracked

when the irradiation changes. As showing in fig.14-
16.from above cases it appear that, the proposed method
find MPPT voltage is much faster than ESC method.At
both cases the energy efficiencies of the methods are
calculated. It can be found by dividing the integration of
the actual output power of PV system for the integration of
ideal maximum power when it operates through the same
interval of time

Efficiency 
P
actual dt (11)
P
ideal dt

Fig. 11. Power of PV array response with constant

irradiance 1000w/m2

performance of the ESC and OPESC simulation were

tested in two cases:
Case 1: Uniform Irradiance G=1000W/m2,T=25°C. The
simulation results show that, OPESC Converges to the
maximum point faster than the ESC. Fig.11-13 approved
this statement. Fig.12 show the OPESC reach to max
voltage fasters than ESC ,also Fig.13 show OPESC reach
to max current faster than ESC ,this make the power in
Fig.11 is converges to MPPT faster than ESC.
Case 2: To verify the powerful the OPESC with change
of weather and make sure that it can follow the MPPT of
rapid air changes, another case is taken to demonstrated
the stability of the method by suddenly irradiance changes Fig. 12. Voltage of PV array response with constant
from G=1000W/m2 to 900 W/m2 , T=25°C .The irradiance 1000w/m2
Fig. 13. current of PV array response with constant Fig. 16. Current of PV array response with variable
irradiance 1000w/m2 irradiance

Fig.17 show the efficiency with different irradiance from

1000 to 500 (W/m2), as shown in the figure, OPESC has
better energy efficiencies of 91.5% in comparison with
the ESC which has 86%. As sun irradiance reduce the
efficiency of both methods are decreases. Also, the
OPESC was converges much faster due to its tuned
parameters.

Fig. 14. Power of PV array response with variable

irradiance

Fig. 17. Efficiency of the methods with different irradiance

7. CONCULSION

The convergence speed of MPPT controller is the

import parameter and any improvement in starting time is
needed and will improve the MPPT reliability. In this
paper the optimal value for ESC parameters is found based
PSO method that reduce the error between ideal and
output power which was used as the objective function.
This tuning improved the ESC operation. ESC and OPESC
are simulated using simulink/matlab with an array of PV
Fig. 15. Voltage of PV array response with variable system under two cases, with sun irradiation is constant
irradiance and variable irradiation (partial shading) .In both cases the
OPESC is conveyance to MPPT point faster than ESC
 ,Also it has better response with sudden change in sun
irradiation ,From the obtained result , it can be concluded
that, the OPESC has a better performance compared the
ESC in term of convergence speed and efficiency of
energy. As future work ,this method can be used in other
system such hybrid solar and wind system .

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