A maximum power point tracking based on levy flight optimization

Abstract

This paper proposes a Levy flight global maximum power point tracking for solar photovoltaic (PV) system under partial shading conditions. The proposed method comes with merits such as simplicity, fast response and free of oscillation. This algorithm uses random search over the exploration space and compares the previous and current states to obtain the best solution. For evaluation and comparative analysis, performance of the proposed method is also measured against Perturb and Observe (P&O) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). All three algorithms are simulated in MATLAB/Simulink environment. Simulation results are satisfactory over the conducted tests under uniform and non-uniform irradiance. The proposed algorithm is able to track global maximum power point (GMPP) under partial shading conditions with fast tracking time and zero ripple at steady-state.