ENERGY SOURCES PART A-RECOVERY UTILIZATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS, 2019 (SCI-Expanded)
Because of dust, trees, high buildings in the surrounding area, partial shading conditions (PSC) occur in photovoltaic (PV) systems. This condition affects the power output of the PV system. Under PSC there is a global maximum power point (GMPP) besides there are a few local maximum power points (LMPP). This condition makes the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) procedure a challenging task. In order to solve this issue, soft computing techniques such as gray wolf optimization (GWO), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) are implemented. However, the performance of MPP trackers still needs to be improved. The main contribution of this paper is improving the tracking speed by implementing BOA to the MPPT of the PV system under PSC. Thus, in real-time applications a promising alternative presented to the literature to improve the performance of the PV systems under variable PSC because of its fast tracking speed. PV system consists of PV array, boost converter and load are modeled and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink. BOA algorithm is implemented for three different insolation scenarios on the PV array. The results of the BOA algorithm verified by a comparative analysis with PSO-GSA and GWO algorithms. The results show that BOA can give high accuracy and better tracking speed than these algorithms in recent literature.