Power Point Tracking in Photovoltaic Systems by Sliding Mode Control

This research details how to design a gridconnected photovoltaic system, including modeling of photovoltaic cells, DC-DC Ćuk design, sliding mode control, etc. It is shown that in the case of embedding coils in input-output structure of Ćuk converter, application of sliding mode control for maximum power point tracking is superior over the other techniques. Maximum power point tracking is implemented in grid-connected photovoltaic system based on Perturb and Observation (P&O) algorithm and sliding mode closed loop control. Due to non-linear nature of the system, the use of sliding mode method can sustain the stability of the converter in wide range of variations in radiation, load, etc. In the proposed sliding mode method, only input voltage and capacitive filter current are utilized as a feedback and the design process is completed without the converter model inclusion. The effectiveness of the proposed photovoltaic system is evaluated by simulations conducted on MATLAB/SIMULINK

Sliding mode control, photovoltaic systems, DC-DC converter, Ćuk converter, maximum power point tracking, Perturb and Observation (P&O) algorithm