Maximum Power Point Tracking for Photovoltaic Systems Operating under Partially Shaded Conditions Using SALP Swarm Algorithm

This article presents a new method based on meta-heuristic algorithm for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) in photovoltaic systems. In this new method, the SALP Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is used instead of classic methods such as the Perturb and Observe (P&O) method. In this method, the value of the duty cycle is optimally determined in an optimization problem by SSA in order to track the maximum power. The objective function in this problem is maximizing the output power of the photovoltaic system. The proposed method has been applied on a photovoltaic system connected to the load, taking into account the effect of partial shade and different atmospheric conditions. The SSA method is compared with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and P&O methods. Additionally, we evaluated the effect of changes in temperature and radiation on solving the problem. The results of the simulation in the MATLAB/Simulink environment show the optimal performance of the proposed method in tracking the maximum power in different atmospheric conditions compared to other methods. To validate the proposed algorithm, it is compared with four important indexes: ISE, ITSE, IAE, and ITAE.