This paper is aimed at harvesting the photovoltaic systems extracting power under difficult irradiance and load conditions, by proposing a novel maximum power point tracking (MPPT). This proposed MPPT tactic has been examined under various climatic and load conditions using two powerful and accurate simulation environments for PV systems, MATLAB/Simulink and Proteus. The first implementation using the MATLAB/Simulink software was carried out to examine the performance of the novel MPPT tactic under sudden insolation and load change, where the second implementation using the Proteus software was carried out in order to prove that the novel MPPT tactic can be easily implemented using low-cost components, Arduino board, and LCD display. The simulation results prove that the novel MPPT tactic has a high convergence speed to locate the MPP, especially at fast solar irradiation and load variation with zero oscillation under steady-state operation, which takes less than 9.6 milliseconds (ms) under the MATLAB/Simulink software and 0.24 microseconds (μs) under Proteus environment. That means it is about six times faster than PO and five times faster than INC MPPT methods, and its tracking efficiency is between 99.40 and 99.86. Furthermore, the novel MPPT tactic shows the best tracking accuracy and better ability to mitigate power losses under overall simulation scenarios compared with other traditional MPPT methods.

This paper offers an innovative maximum power point tracking (MPPT) approach for photovoltaic system under temperature varying. Basically, the innovative approach is introduced to improve tracking performance under difficult scenarios of temperature change. By far, it can be used to avoid the main shortcomings of the conventional MPPT strategies, e.g., ripple around the MPP at steady-state regime, sluggishness velocity converging, and loss of tracking direction under fast change of temperature. Also, it can be used to improve the tracking performance under low irradiance level and rapid load change. With respect to its direct control strategy based on the photovoltaic current control, it provides a quick tracking of the real MPP without steady-state fluctuations. To show the advantages and accuracy of the innovative MPPT approach, a comparison with other traditional strategies, e.g., P&O and INC techniques is investigated using simulation in MATLAB/Simulink® software under different scenarios of temperature, load, and insolation levels. In the light of the results collected, the innovative MPPT approach minimized the convergence time by five times, reduced the steady-state fluctuations to zero and improved the average tracking efficiency by 8.51% and 9.04% compared to the P&O and INC MPPT schemes, respectively.

This paper develops and discusses an improved MPPT approach for temperature variation with fast-tracking speed and reduced steady-state oscillation. This MPPT approach can be added to numerous existing MPPT algorithms in order to enhance their tracking accuracy and response time and to reduce the power loss. The improved MPPT method is fast and accurate to follow the maximum power point under critical temperature conditions without increasing the implementation complexity. The simulation results under different scenarios of temperature and insolation were presented to validate the advantages of the proposed method in terms of tracking efficiency and reduction of power loss at dynamic and steady-state conditions. The simulation results obtained when the proposed MPPT technique was added to different MPPT techniques, namely, perturb and observe (P&O), incremental conductance (INC), and modified MPP-Locus method, show significant enhancements of the MPP tracking performances, where the average efficiency of the conventional P&O, INC, and modified MPP-Locus MPPT methods under all scenarios is presented, respectively, as 98.85%, 98.80%, and 98.81%, whereas the average efficiency of the improved P&O, INC, and modified MPP-Locus MPPT methods is 99.18%, 99.06%, and 99.12%, respectively. Furthermore, the convergence time enhancement of the improved approaches over the conventional P&O, INC, and modified MPP-Locus methods is 2.06, 5.25, and 2.57 milliseconds, respectively; besides, the steady-state power oscillations of the conventional P&O, INC, and modified MPP-Locus MPPT methods are 2, 1, and 0.6 watts, but it is neglected in the case of using the improved approaches. In this study, the MATLAB/Simulink software package was selected for the implementation of the whole PV system.