Interleaved high-gain boost converter powered by solar energy using hybrid-based MPP tracking technique

Abstract

This paper presents a solar-powered interleaved high-gain boost converter (IHGBC) that increases voltage gain with fewer ripples in the output voltage in comparison to existing DC-DC converters. The goal of this research is to develop a hybrid-based maximum power point tracking (MPPT) approach with the combination of a flower pollination (FP) algorithm assisted with a perturb & observe (P&O) MPPT approach for solar photovoltaic (SPV) systems integrated with IHGBC. To ensure effective usage of both FP and P&O algorithms, this study incorporates and validates the hybrid-based MPPT approach. The proposed solar-powered IHGBC with a hybrid-based MPPT algorithm has been computationally modelled and simulated using MATLAB® and Simulink® for both uniform and non-uniform irradiation and analysed for voltage gain, ripples in the output waveforms and convergence time. The proposed hybrid-based MPPT is based on a number of flowers that forecast the initial global peak, assisted by P&O in the last stage for faster convergence to attain the maximum power point (MPP). As a result, the hybrid-based MPPT approach alleviates the computational issues encountered in P&O and FP-based MPP approaches. The proposed hybrid MPPT is compared with conventional MPPT for SPV and the results show that the solar-powered IHGBC using a hybrid-based MPPT technique has negligible oscillations of 0.14% with a high-voltage gain of 7.992 and a fast convergence rate of 0.05 seconds compared to individual P&O-based MPPT and FP-based MPPT techniques. The simulation results of the proposed MPPT with IHGBC outperform the conventional MPPT with high-gain converters.